Life and Life

Kenneth Noye, 52, a key member of the gang behind Britain’s biggest armed robbery in 1983, remained expressionless as the jury convicted him of the murder in May 1996 of Stephen Cameron by stabbing him twice to end a roadside punch-up. Jailed for life.

A NORFOLK farmer who claimed he was only defending himself and his home when he shot dead a teenage intruder during a burglary was convicted of murder. The judge said the fates of Tony Martin, 55, and Fred Barras, the 16-year-old he killed with a shotgun blast to the back, were “a dire warning” to burglars and householders who used unreasonable force to protect their homes. Martin, who had suffered repeated burglaries at his remote and squalid Victorian farmhouse….Jailed for life.

I’ve been a little selective in my quotes, but you can get the gist of the stories from the links. My question, how fair is it that, under British law, a man convicted of a random killing and another convicted of killing a burglar can be given the same sentence? In my opinion, it defies belief.

Okay; let’s say you were robbed. You found out who robbed you, and tracked the robber back to his home. You wait outside with a shotgun, and when the robber comes out of his home, BLAM! you take him out.

In this instance, were you defending your home, or were you committing murder?

The point I’m trying to bring up is that there are legal standards to be met even if you’re trying to deal with someone who is breaking those standards. Specifically, you have no right to endanger someone’s life unless your life is endangered as well. That’s not just English, that’s American law as well. If you break into my house but show no inclination to cause me harm- you make no threats, carry no weapon, and run away when you get caught- I have no legal right to grab a gun and shoot at you.

I’m sure DSYoungEsq or Bricker will answer with a better legal grasp, but the basic idea is that you can’t respond to a burglary with deadly force and expect a slap on the wrist.


JMCJ

“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame

I don’t know much about British Common Law but I have a working knowledge of American Criminal Law which probably isn’t too far off the British.

American law holds that you are permitted a reasonable and proportionate response to a threat. If an unarmed person is robbing your house you do NOT have the right to shoot him (or her). If your life is in immenent danger then you may respond with lethal force to protect yourself (or another person similarly threatened).

Of course, in practice this is difficult. I’ve never heard an answer to what the court expects you to do when a burglar is in your house. Ask him if he’s armed first? If so with what kind of weapon? As a homeowner are you expected to keep a variety of weapons on hand so if he says he has a bat you can grab a bat as well off of your Rack 'o Weapons?

This is definitely a difficult one to nail down. In the end the court does not want people taking the law into their own hands. One of the reasons you can’t booby trap your own property. Anytime someone trespassed on your property you could shoot them and say, 'Hey, he wasn’t supposed to be there! He could have been a threat to me!"

Given that the burglar in your example above was shot in the back it sounds as if the shooter had the drop (so to speak) on the burglar. The court would expect you to warn the intruder you had a gun pointed at him and to give up. Since you gave no further details I will assume the guy didn’t warn the burglar at all and simply shot him when he got the chance. That is murder in any court (at least in the US or Britain).

Still I don’t know that the homeowner should have gotten life as well. He clearly hadn’t planned out a murder so it would classify this as 3rd degree or maybe second degree murder. A murder committed during the course of committing another crime is usually labelled First Degree murder (I think). First Degree is usually life without paroll. The others carry various sentences that may be long but aren’t considered life imprisonment.

Jeff- I don’t know the facts in the case, so this is pure speculation (based on watching too much Law & Order, probably); but I think the farmer could have been brought up on First Degree murder had he specifically been planning to gun down the next burglar- if the prosecutors proved that the man had made general threats about it, or had bought the gun and taken firearms classes recently, they could have argued that the farmer planned to kill someone, and that the two men he did kill just happened to be the ones unlucky enough to fall into his sights.

Again, pure speculation though.


JMCJ

“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame

you forget, its both murder. thus the same sentance, even if the scenarios are different.

you forget, its both murder. thus the same sentance, even if the scenarios are different.

bj0rn - chickens for sale…!


(You know, I find it helps to copy it to WordPad and then fix all the punctuation errors, etc., so they’re not so distracting. Then I usually light some incense, sacrifice a chicken to the spirit of Kate Turabian, and get really drunk. Then it actually starts to make sense.) - notthemama

you forget, its both murder. thus the same sentance, even if the scenarios are different.

bj0rn - chickens for sale…!


(You know, I find it helps to copy it to WordPad and then fix all the punctuation errors, etc., so they’re not so distracting. Then I usually light some incense, sacrifice a chicken to the spirit of Kate Turabian, and get really drunk. Then it actually starts to make sense.) - notthemama

you forget, its both murder. thus the same sentance, even if the scenarios are different.

bj0rn - chickens for sale…!


(You know, I find it helps to copy it to WordPad and then fix all the punctuation errors, etc., so they’re not so distracting. Then I usually light some incense, sacrifice a chicken to the spirit of Kate Turabian, and get really drunk. Then it actually starts to make sense.) - notthemama

Come on guys, you know where “how fair is it” questions go. Moving these threads is one of the things that screws up the board. Please take a few seconds to consider where you are going to post a thread before doing so.

I’m moving this thread (I hope) to Great Debates.