I can think of no-one who could stand to be judged by the worst thing they ever did, I certainly could not. I think it is, therefore, usually incorrect to sentenece a young man to become an old man in jail, denied Remorse's clarification to him of his misbehaviour, condemned forever, his ongoing punishment a meaningless salve to Vengeance's inoperable cancer.
I feel that extensive sentences, say ten years upwards, are merited only in the case of untreatable criminal insanity - in which case the offender should be treated as patient - and in the cases of massive, cynical human rights violations and war crimes such as those instigated and condoned by so many of a global elite, people like - but by no means exclusively - Tony Blair, Michael Howard, Jack Straw, David Miliband, Geoff Hoon, Des Browne and Bob Ainsworth; Justice's victory in their cases would require extended incarceration, although sadly Justice, or even - as we see with the Chilcott farce and the Leon Brittan controversy - investigative scrutiny seldom trouble lawmakers.
Oscar Pistorious does not, I feel, belong among Tony Blair's cadre of cruel wickedness. He is a deeply obnoxious young man but looking, just now, at his pig of an uncle,
SUCH A MEAN OLD MAN.
We Pistoriouses have suffered dreadfully, as much as the Steemkamps,
and we now want you all to shut up and fuck off.
Oscar's character is probably not of his own devising.
Aside from whatever momentary rage compelled his disgusting behaviour he shows little sign of being a repeat, sadistic killer but I do believe that he should have been convicted of murder, I don't know what else one would call his actions, firing four dum-dum bullets
into a confined space containing another human is murder;
This is not the result of carelessness;
this can only be deliberate.
there is no mitigatiion for his behaviour and his tongue-tied and apparently incoherent Judge danced for some hours on a pinhead to insist that such murderous behaviour can be deemed merely neglectful, can happen without mens rea.
into a confined space containing another human is murder;
This is not the result of carelessness;
this can only be deliberate.
there is no mitigatiion for his behaviour and his tongue-tied and apparently incoherent Judge danced for some hours on a pinhead to insist that such murderous behaviour can be deemed merely neglectful, can happen without mens rea.
For all her bullshit about the complex business of sentencing, deterrence, retribution and rehabilitation and how the public is too stupid to understand it all, Her Leddeeship failed in her original conviction and anything which follows, therefore, is tainted.
As for her contemptible nonsense about maintaining public confidence, the message she sends is that if you can afford a fancy lawyer, if you are celebrated and if you are a meal ticket to countless hangers-on you can kill whoever you want and then argue it down to a few months in jail.
The prosecution should appeal.
16 comments:
M'laydee was clearly savouring her 15 minutes of fame and whilst I agree that a long sentence was uncalled for I feel the fact that he had a weapon loaded with hollow-point ammunition shows a degree of premeditation that could not be over-looked.
The only point of dum-dums is to absolutely ensure killing your target.
I don't think that the ammo should trouble us too much. It is just part of the macho kaffir-stopping power as far as they are concerned. If you discharge a firearm loaded with anything in the direction where somebody is likely to be you, should be mindful that they will very surely be at risk of death. Oscar is tonto anyway. I am surprised that he did not have a buffalo-stopping howitzer. Nobody in this house believes the intruder story anyway. OP went bonkers, we think, after a row and shot the hell out of the loo with the poor lady in it. Guilty bastard goes to jail for a few years though - sounds like a decent outcome to me.
What does concern me is the little repeated story that Oscar has been sending money every month to Reeva's parents, and that they have been taking it. What goes on there, I wonder, and will there be a civil suit to soothe the pain of loss with filthy lucre?
I believe that her parents were woefully skint, Reeva had been financing them and now wasn't and to make matters worse Dad had a stroke after the killing; they accepted the money but now that they are better off, perhaps as a result of interview fees, they have sent the money back, need a heart of stone, mr mongoose, to condemn them.
As for the bullets, I think it does matter vis a vis the verdict - if he knew enough to choose them he knew enough to know what one of them would do, let alone four of them. I should think that never mind Mongoose Hall, nobody in the world, apart from Judge Thozolike Misopa, believes the intruder story. And she, as the owner of the SNP, Donald Trump, avows, is a fucking moron.
I have also been puzzled by this portrayal of the victim as brilliant, a law grauate and so on when all of her despairing friends are pigshit thick, airhead bimbo nitwits, maybe it wasn't just with the psychobastard athlete that she was slumming it.
Ozzie, as you actually demonstrate in your comment, should, regardless of the other matters, be seen as a murderer who killed the girl in a rage and should have been treated as such.
Your opening words ring true here Mr I and it is always horrible to see humans baying for vengeance as though that has ever led us to peace and grace. I agree that the main disgrace here has been the intellectual slovenliness of the judicial process.
Hollow point ammunition is preferred in some police departments worldwide because these rounds, once in the target, tend not to wander off causing collateral damage to innocent bystanders. The fact that they cause massive trauma to the target is neither here nor there, of course ... Not saying I agree with, or approve of, their use - I think all firearms are bloody horrible - just pointing out why they are used.
I listen to everyone have their say about this case, and with the usual respect to Mr. I's conclusions in particular. However, because I am a father and grandfather, and because I am an unforgiving soul when it comes to this sort of thing, I will confess that had it been my daughter/granddaughter I am afraid that the courts and associated drawn out legal procedures (this happened last Feb, FFS?) would not have been troubled unduly. I accept fully that this would not be the behaviour of a civilized man. But it is said that this trigger-happy unstable fool will be out in less than a year. Give it a wee while and it is more than possible that someone else will upset him and pay the price. He should be locked away for an awfully long time, it seems to me.
All you would have done, then, your majesty, would be to have taken Oscar's place in jail, but for longer, adding to the sorrow of your surviving kin. It is, of course, of course, of course, perfectly natural, the wish for revenge but large numbers of people living together cannot survive with its enablement and so we abdicate such responsibility to the state, expecting it to act dispassionately and in a measured fashion, determining guilt or innocence and when appropriate meeting the joint needs for retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation. Judge Musipa failed in the first of these tasks and was thus compromised in the second.
You and not I may be correct regarding Pistorious reoffending but the failure to convict him means firstly that he will feel that he has got away with it, albeit not completely and secondly that he will spend insufficient time in custody for his offending behaviour to be properly identified much less addressed. As mr bungalow bill said, for all her verbosity the judge was, in terms of effective jurisprudence, a slovenly trollop.
You are, of course quite correct, Mr. I. Romans 12:19 and all that.
I remember being moved to tears many years ago by the simple and searing dignity of an Irish father whose daughter had been killed in a bombing carried out by the IRA. In the aftermath of that dreadful day, he said that he forgave the attackers and that it was only through forgiveness that peace could ever be found in that tortured community. He was absolutely right of course, and it is a measure of his humanity and greatness of spirit that he was able to express such feelings on a day when his soul must have been aching unbearably. If I were ever in his position - Heaven forfend - I hope I would be able to say the same words ... but I rather fear that darker thoughts would be harboured behind the words. I am not as good a man as he. And it would not be vengeance I sought, but a reckoning ... a balancing of the scales, if you will.
I do struggle with this; perhaps I am just not as enlightened as may reasonably be expected of me when I am of an age where wisdom is supposed to prevail. And perhaps that observation is intellectual laziness used as a cop-out to justify physical rage against the Ungodly. As it used to say so often in my old School Reports, I must try harder.
Gordon Wilson, I think his name was, of Enniskillen, the true face of the peace proh-cess. Odd how the warlords, McGuinness and Blair, vain cowards, managed to claim credit.. As I said, caratacus, there are people beyond mercy and rehabilitation.
I never mean to beat anybody up, nor have them scold themselves; enlightenment is for the blessed, all we can do is share our thoughts and I often quote my old friend, Gaugin, life being what it is, one dreams of vengeance.
The fact that he had a loaded pistol around the house at all shows that he's not unduly concerned about killing intruders. This being South Africa I can't say I blame him.
The attrition rate of white farmers there is quite shocking. One a week - in some remote little farm - is murdered. Bearing in mind these guys live in fucking fortresses surrounded by dogs, iron bars, security systems and armed to the fucking teeth a less cynical man might suspect the ANC of having a couple of highly trained, very well equipped, roving death-squads.
You might have limited sympathy for them, Mr I, seeing it as merely their due come-uppance for 200 or 300 years of oppression but if the sins of the fathers are to be visited on the sons then there is some biblical sin-visiting going on in SA.
What I'm trying to say, though, is that once you've decided that your life is/may be in danger (and in SA there is no doubt that it is in danger) and you mentally prepare yourself to use 'deadly force', as I think the yanks call it, then there is no point fucking around.
Yeah, I want to shoot him, but only a little bit. Nope, you'll want some hollow-point ammunition. No point doing half a job.
If I could legally buy guns in the UK then I would. Better to have them and not need them...
That said, it sounds like this Oscar is a fucking loon. It's one thing to be prepared. It's quite another to go around (as he apparently had done in the past) shooting randomly into the air in public. Sounds like the fucking Taliban when you do that sort of thing.
Yes, Mr I, I have since looked about and it is as you say. The parents at the mercy of every bastard, even the killer of their daughter. Her mother indeed has the look of one who knows much that she doesn't want to know, and who now may never sleep again.
A villain is in his cell. Let us at least be thankful for that. Guilty of what? Does it matter? Guilty of killing that poor woman, and that must now be enough.
I swing back and forth on that, mr jgm2, that better to have one and not need it than to need one and not have one thing. I am sure that I or more likely, given my diabetes, mrs ishmael, could hold a shotgun or two but so far I haven't, fearing that the possession might generate the need for use. A different referendum result might have changed that view, as would the rise of nasty Poundlandsim or indeed any comparable South African-style political situation.
Given the shallow nature of the personalities involved and the artifice of the relationship and the fact that it was Valentine's Day, together with all the crime scene and forensic stuff, I believe that the intruder story is fucking rubbish, that he killed her because she wouldn't do what he wanted, maybe recoiled from his disability and that if he hadn't had a firearm he would have just beaten her to death or stabbed or strangled her.
Primed, by them, to believe in his own superiority I believe he should be sharing a cell with his uncle and his agents. And for rather more than ten months.
I watched a couple of docs about the parents, mr mongoose, and found them gracious and compassionate. I am glad that they feel not too badly served but would expect them, shortly, to rue their approval and encouragement of Reeva's frivolous and patently dangerous life choices; isn't model just another spelling of victim?
Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Steenkamp, don't put your daughter on the stage.......
We must wait and see if this is the end of it, the national prosecution service did not close the door on appealing the conviction, although if they do appeal it is another demerit for their already damaged token black female judge who, let's face it, was fucking rubbish, spluttering about mercy, having sentenced a black rapist - not killer, mind, rapist - to 250 years in jail, She needs removing, disbarring and exiling. She's the sort of legal mind that Tracey May could employ to head the ToryBeasting Cover-up.. Good for fuck all.
MrI - the problem with waiting to see the referendum result or the rise of UKIP or several million people fleeing an Ebola outbreak in London and looking to help themselves to my food and my house is that by the time the situation has 'blown up' - then it's too late.
Several million shotgun license applications cannot be processed overnight.
You are now at the mercy of those who, for the sake of 50 quid every five years and - I dunno - a one-off £150 for a second hand shotgun, decided that they would indeed purchase that level of insurance. Not that you're allowed to suggest - well, not if you want the fucking license, -
that you plan to use it defend yourself and home against all-comers. Fuck no. Vermin control. That's the fucking reason. Rabbits yer honour. And pigeons. Fucking things eating all my cabbages.
Yes, you're right, mr jgm2, need to be a bit more Peaky Blinders about things, I guess my flamethrower, sharpened sticks and working knowledge of Comrade Molotov's libation are not much use against a twelve-bore; better than nothing, though. We should get a certificate.
The right and proper punishment would have been to enforce this silly arrogant young man to take on the support of the girls parents until they finally died. They could then let him out of jail to continue looking after his own.
He is surely disability's greatest ambassador since Blind Boy Blunkett; politicians and athletes are notoriously arrogant, their achievements so irrelevant, a penny off tax here, a tenth of a second off a world record there and yet showbusiness loves them. It is, mr alphons, our cretinous lack of discernment, our absence of values which are causal and as corrosive as this revolting specimen's arrogance.
The only benefit of the NewLabour project was that it awakened so many to the contemptible daily behaviour of career politicians. Having looked at comments from all over the world, I would say that this farce of a trial has, among very many, similarly disproved the bollocks talked by cops, lawyers, judges and global media; the world is disgusted by the Pistorious trial judge and by the emphasis of media on the villain's manipulated celebrity status. I bet the authorities now wish they hadn't televised such ludicrous incompetencd. As for suuporting the bereaved, well, A decent society would confiscate the defence lawyers' fees and give them to the family. I never heard anything like it - Oscar is the victim, he has lost so much............Christ Almighty, McCannism, spreading around the world.
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