Increased penalties for the guilty are a totally different matter. Go and talk to your local member of parliament about increasing the maximum penalties in the Crimes Act and, if that happens, you will see the penalties currently imposed go up without fail.

Of course and I have not in any way suggested otherwise. I am advocating increased penalities for the guilty, not kangaroo courts where the innocent are framed. Why can’t you see that??

Get used to it. We’re done listening to the likes of you.

Red, when you say that “the prime purpose of the Justice system is to keep law abiding citizens free from crime” you are completely wrong. If that role exists, it belongs to the Police. The purpose of the justice system, that being the system of courts that are in place in New Zealand, is to impartially and fairly hear and rule between two competing parties on the question of whether an allegation of criminal offending has been proved beyond reasonable doubt and, if it has, to hand down a just sentence consistent with the offending.

It is precisely when people begin to view the courts as being responsible for keeping us free from crime that our view of the courts become both unreasonable and wrong. If you start from that viewpoint then you are always going to be disappointed in the courts because they are not acting according to your expectations. That is like complaining when your car does not fly- it can fulfil its function fine, but that is not what you want it to do so it obviously is failing as a car.

John Ansell, the justice system is about delivering justice to the offender, as I keep telling you. You, also, have an incorrect expectation of the justice system. It may be possible to tack onto the system something that allows complainants a sense of personal vengeance, but the problem is that each complainant has different views on what justice means to them and to cater to all of them is impossible. Some don’t care about the case, so long as the offender is caught, some are vitally interested in it and follow it at every detail. Most complainants seem to fit into the first category, some even can’t be bothered turning up to the case based on their complaint. My issue with what you say is that you wish to give the complainant or ‘victim’ free reign to say whatever they want in court. Having heard death threats, threats of GBH, painful an prolonged death and suchlike, along with allegations of all sorts of improper conduct made against the lawyer/s outside of courtrooms, I do not think it appropriate to import it into the sentencing process. You may think that is not reasonable behaviour, but others do, so who is right? My standard for what is reasonable behaviour in such a setting is obviously higher than yours, so is my standard better or yours?

I do think the courtroom is one place where decorum and dignity makes far more of an impact than vilification and condemnation, and I will always hold that opinion.

that will only come from the hearts of NZers

It’s difficult to touch hearts when all you do is kick people in the testicles.
Attack, attack, attack.

and the restoration of the patriarchal family unit

Have you any suggestions as to how this could be achieved?
Attack, attack, attack any woman who won’t be subjugated?

The answer to crime is a more orderly and moral society, and that will only come from the hearts of NZers, and the restoration of the patriarchal family unit and not by means of more oppressive legislation by government, that useless broken entity that all Progressives worship so mindlessly.

In the meantime, we need to do something to clean up the mess the Progressives have made, and that means locking up the dregs of the corrupt and amoral and soulless society they have incrementally created. (over the period that Mr. George provides the stats for above)

F.E. Smith: You clearly know what the system is. I’m more concerned about what it should be. About what would make justice just.

I simply don’t see what is wrong with allowing a murdered person’s relative to express his or her full feelings about the matter – within the bounds of reasonable behaviour.

I thought the censored passages were reasonable. What did others think? (Check the Sensible Sentencing Trust site and scroll down to the Victim Impact Statements of Gill Elliot and Brian Brown.)

And if removing those passages from the father’s carefully prepared statement without the father’s consent is not censorship, Mr/s Smith, then we are speaking different languages.

Garth McVicar makes the reasonable point that when someone has shown by his actions that he has nothing but contempt for other human beings, he should be kept away from other human beings.

That’s not an extreme view. That’s not vengeful bloodlust. That’s common sense.

Mr Elliot had had to endure, on top of everything else, a prolonged and orchestrated litany of lies from his daughter’s murderer. The system allowed him to say precisely what he liked.

But it did not allow the victim’s father to say precisely what he liked. To have done so would have been fair. I know it would not have been normal to you legal practitioners, and that is my point.

If the justice system is not about delivering justice for the victim, it should be.

When some quaint notion of courtroom etiquette comes before justice, then I believe it is the justice system that is ‘incorrect’.

Mr Mcvicar wants ‘guilty’ people (as he defines it) to be dealt to by his mob and he is most certainly an enemy of freedom.

The reason we have Courts and Judges is often to protect guilty people from vigilante justice which would otherwise be dished out by nutters like Mcvicar.

Many gullible well meaning people were right royally conned for many years by Graham Capill and I suspect Mcvicar is as ’selfless’ and ‘innocent’ as he was.

http://www.nightcitytrader.blogspot.com

The redactions in Mr Elliots statement (which I have read, by the way) were correct and proper. Some of his statement was not a ‘victim impact statement’ but instead was a commentary on Weatherston, the trial process and the defence. That is not what a victim impact statement is for,

I would have thought a victim impact statement is about the impact of the crime and it’s consequences on the victim’s family. Surely the trial process is part of that. If the person’s statement is edited then I don’t see the point in having one.

Christopher Simpson – hardly anyoen online uses their own names. You have to get used to it. It annoys the hell out of me, even when some of the anonymous posters say things I agree with.

It is my firm belief that NZ as a country has turned its back on personal morality

To an extent this may be true, but I think it is more a slipping of some standards rather than conscious turning away from them. There is an increasing lack of restraint from anger and abuse on the streets, in homes, and in blogs. You are sometimes an example of those deteriorating personal standards.

the prime purpose of the Justice system is to keep law abiding citizens free from crime.

No it’s not. If that were the case, to ensure law abiding citizens were kept free from crime, we could have a justice system that locked up permanently or executed someone who proposed and promoted armed uprisings.

We will never be free from crime. Pretty much everyone breaks the law at some time. The best we can do is to try and reduce crime. In previous times and in other places people were imprisoned more, executed for less, shipped to penal colonies, and none of that resulted in zero crime.

that means locking the bastards up for longer and more securely.

We have been doing that. It doesn’t seem to have fixed the problem.

Prison Rates per 100,000 total population
1950 56
1960 76
1970 83
1980 88
1990 117
2000 146
2004 179
2009 195
http://www.howardleague.co.nz/factsheets/factsheet_37.html

SST is getting it’s way already, and it hasn’t fixed the problem.

That said, the prime purpose of the Justice system is to keep law abiding citizens free from crime. It is failing miserably in this objective. In fact I believe there have been something like 60 or 70 murders in NZ that have been committed because criminals were released from jail when they should not have been.

Criminals are often found to have records that involve scores of previous convictions. Most often too late for this knowledge to be any help to their latest victim.

Law abiding citizens need an urgent remedy to the wave of crime that makes NZ one of the most dangerous countries in the world to live. There is no more immediate and simple solution than locking criminals up for longer periods.

Furthermore, harsh sentences and even the death penalty help us all by making it clear to criminals and would be criminals exactly where our moral boundaries lie.

So the task people in Justice need to accomplish is to get off their fucking arses, stop waffling about the damn welfare of the offenders, and start doing their real job- keeping law abiding citizens free from crime. That means locking the bastards up for longer and more securely.

There might be a better solution out there, but it isn’t evident right now, so do what you can do, and get the hell on with it. Lock the bastards up, and lock em up for a damn long time. You’re obliged to do so by means of the implicit agreement you have with NZ’s civilized law abiding citizens- TO KEEP THEM SAFE.

As I have said before, the criminal justice system is about the offences and the offender, not the victim. While it may be a good idea to have supports in place for victims of crime, the process itself is not about them but about discovering facts and punishing wrongdoers. You, Mr McVicar, and many others work from a completely incorrect viewpoint of criminal justice and that means that your positions start in the wrong place.

It is that sort of thinking that allows there to be a ‘victim’ even when there has been no crime.

Your view of the judiciary as box ticking is also wrong, but of course you wouldn’t accept that coming from me, now, would you? Many of us have been victims of crime (some at the hands of our own clients, even) but we continue to do this job because it is important that somebody does. We do not live in ivory towers, Mr Ansell, we are real people.

But the sentencing process is to punish the offender and their actions, not to allow the victim the chance to abuse the prisoner. In this case it is your view that is incorrect.

Not so. I found his email revealing the uncensored version of those two victim impact statements very helpful. It showed me the level of censorship that takes place in our courtrooms – something I hadn’t realised.

I am not setting myself up as an apologist for everything Garth McVicar does, and if, as you suggest, he has made it harder for an innocent person to prove his innocence then I wouldn’t support him on that.

“Some of [Mr Elliot's] statement was not a ‘victim impact statement’ but instead was a commentary on Weatherston, the trial process and the defence. That is not what a victim impact statement is for, nor can I see how allowing a family member the ability to comment broadly on the way a trial has been run can benefit the court in sentencing.”

Now that’s precisely my point about lawyers. You think a victim impact statement is for the benefit of the court. And it may be, officially.

But many of us humble victims and potential victims would say it should be for the benefit of the victim.

If the emotive nature of that statement should affect the judge – in other words, if it connects with him as a human being, as opposed to a box-ticking robot – then well and good.

Edit: and please never mistake vilification of an offender for justice of any sort. It isn’t.

You say to Murray that “less than 1% of complainants ever read their victim impact statements, so any changes are really window dressing on that part.”

Then you say to DPF that “The harm in allowing the complaint to have their say unrestricted by rules is that you start to turn the courtroom into a circus. That cannot be allowed to happen.”

Why not, if the circus only comes to town in 1% of cases? (Just a harmless bit of window dressing for the big top.)

You seem to reflect the barristerial stereotype that looks upon the victim as an occupational hazard.

You seem to be saying: Nothing must impinge upon the dignity of the court – not even justice.

Otherwise, Red, I sit firmly within the ACT spectrum of the right.

But. Mr Ansell, I can tell you that as a criminal lawyer Mr McVicar gets only my disapproval because he is more than willing to comment on a case when the media come to him and request a statement. He does this with no knowledge of the case and without the benefit of having an understanding of what went on in the case. His statements are never helpful and only serve to inflame the media and those reading the MSM reports.

While I have no reason to doubt your assertion that Mr McVicar has expressed concern for some murderer or other. But I disagree with Rex when he says that McVicar only has one note- he has two: tougher sentences and skewing the justice process in favour of the ‘victim’, which in reality means reducing the right and ability of an accused person to defend their charges. Even though something like 90% of people charged with an offence plead guilty, the SST still wants to make it even tougher.

The fact is that criminal justice is purposely designed to be robust in order for us to be able to say, at least most of the time, that truth was reached in the case. It isn’t always, but we should strive as much as possible for those miscarriages of justice to be rectified. The protections in the system, those same rights that many people, even on this blog, want to see removed to allow even more people to be convicted, regardless of innocence, are there because over centuries society has become aware of the true power of the state to coerce and safeguards have been set up against it. Today we are complacent against the exercise of this coercive power, probably because we live in an ‘enlightened’ age where the population thinks the government and the law commission knows best. The problem is, Mr Ansell, that Mr McVicar and his organisation would change processes to actually endanger more innocent people. He accuses the defence bar of bad faith, suggests that appeals should be restricted and worse.

Of course, bad things happen when that is the case. Read this: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/legal-affairs/afp-blasted-over-rape-evidence/story-e6frg97x-1225797555503

The redactions in Mr Elliots statement (which I have read, by the way) were correct and proper. Some of his statement was not a ‘victim impact statement’ but instead was a commentary on Weatherston, the trial process and the defence. That is not what a victim impact statement is for, nor can I see how allowing a family member the ability to comment broadly on the way a trial has been run can benefit the court in sentencing. If Mr Elliot wanted to launch invective against Weatherston then he could have done it in the media after the sentencing. That is his right. But please don’t argue that such should be the case in the courtroom.

Finally, don’t forget that Mr McVicar chose to advance himself in this area. Nobody has forced him to take part in any of this, and as a result he has, somehow, got the government’s ear. I find that utterly astonishing, when those who actually participate in the system find abuse hurled at their views (as per the CJ’s statements). If Mr McVicar wishes to work with vicitms then I applaud that. But the way he is doing it at present is unhelpful.

Going back to the original topic, however, may I say again that for the most part these statements work as they are intended and should be left as they are.

Edit: Put it away: Their is real danger in adopting what the ‘man in the street’ feels is appropriate in criminal justice because it will surely lead to injustice. Even more, the ‘man in the street’ will support only until he is caught in a system where innocence is irrelevant and the only thing necessary to send you to prison are accusations. I have seen it happen and without the safeguards that currently exist it will happen more often than anybody could be comfortable with.

The reason the left spits poison at such a man is simple – the left love to tell themselves that they represent the “common man”, and that their wet-bus-ticket notions of crime and punishment are somehow in the interest of the common man, and supported by them. They are not. The common man wants to see the likes of Weatherston fried in the electric chair or strung up by the balls. The left can’t stand the fact that Sensible Sentencing is articulating something much closer to what the man in the street *really* thinks, than the champagne socialist “justice” espoused by the academic liberals who live in the leafy suburbs where they will be unlikely to be faced with the violent criminals that they have let loose on the working class areas.