Manslaughter

Posted on July 15th, 2008 by ray.
Categories: General Blog.

I’ve been having some chats recently about the laws when it comes to causing death whilst on the roads, and some of my recent posts are where people have been killed and their “killer” only got a fine. The maximum penalty for “driving with undue care” in England is a £5000 fine (means tested) and no custodial sentence.

Death by dangerous driving is more serious and carries up to a ten year sentence,  but what most people consider as dangerous are very different to what the courts decide is just undue care. Personally I consider most actions which stop you looking where you’re going, be it arguing with the kids in the back seat, dicking around on your sat-nav, looking for a CD in the glove compartment, trying to find your lighter in your handbag etc. as dangerous as it’s a very logical sequence of events and certainly not ‘accidental’, however the law says otherwise.

This has sparked the debate of what benefit there is to putting people like this in prison, as they never intentionally meant to kill someone and it was literally a moment of undue care that tragically resulted in a death. Would locking them up with other criminals actually serve any purpose other than a sense of justice or revenge for the significant other’s of the victim.

I’ve looked at this more as it is an interesting topic for how we as a society deal with situations like this. People’s opinions vary greatly from public floggings and capital punishment right down to the do away with jails as the perpetrator is the real victim and needs rehabilitation and forgiveness.

I’ve also had mixed emotions when imagining a family member being on both sides of a situation like this:

1) A family member is knocked down and killed by a car driver having a lapse of concentration
2) A family member having a lapse of concentration and killing someone else.

Then I took a step back and asked myself a more simple question:

“There is already a crime of unintentionally killing someone, and that is manslaughter, so why are we singling out motorists and making them exempt?”

The cynic in me would say it is because the standard of driving is now so low and that deaths are that common then it is becoming the norm, and we don’t want to be locking too many people up.

I don’t expect a perfect law, but I do expect a consistent law. If we’re basically letting people off for one type of manslaughter then we should be doing the same for even more ‘accidental’ or indirect deaths.

Perhaps we should modernise our manslaughter laws and include in this vehicular manslaughter, and then decide how strict or lenient we want to be on the whole manslaughter law in general?

Hmmm.

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Out with a shower of savages

Posted on July 15th, 2008 by ray.
Categories: General Blog.

I’ve spent the last week back in Ireland.

It was quite a busy week as I wanted to make sure I saw as much of the family as possible (i.e. the uncles, aunts and cousins who live in county Kerry as well as my parents) and thankfully managed to get to see everyone.

Weather turned out to be better than the UK, so made the most of the sunshine and did a but of travelling as well.

Main highlights:

- Watching the Kerry vs Cork match in a pub for the Munster Football Final, even though Kerry lost to the red bastards.
- A day out to see Daniel O’Connell’s house
- Finally getting out for a meal to a very good Italian restaurant in Killarney (had to cancel last time we were over as Lisa and myself were both full of colds)
- Restocking on Irish whiskey
- Drinking lots of stout

Back now though, so back to the gym to make up for a week or self-abuse

In other news, my PC at home is a bit screwed and  think I’ll need to splash out on a new hard drive as it’s making horrible noises and my applications are all crashing. Thankfully I had the foresight to have a second drive for all my iTunes and other media so they are safe. Just need a new primary drive for the O/S

I have also found the wonder that is http://www.bagster.com/en/ that sells tank bags for my ZX10 (or the ZX10 Tomcat as the Yanks named it) . I’d been after one of these for ages as they look pretty cool on a bike and would do wonders for mine as my tank is painted by myself, so you can guess the quality of it.. Need to find out how much it is.

It’s Lisa’s bday on Monday so off for a meal at Tonic in Notts.

Anyway, I think that’s pretty much it.

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