Life and Life

Great Debates
1

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.

2

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

3

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.

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

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.

10

A Life sentence in the UK does not mean what it may appear to mean.
A Life sentence is a lifetime licence of supervision not a lifetime of incarceration.
Offenders sent down for life will serve sentences whose length is detremined by a tariff set by the trial judge and approved by the Home Secretary.
The tariff can mean literally until death or anything between fifteen years and up.
On any tariff there is a recommendation of a minimum to parole but it is not common for a lifer to get that at the first shout.
A lifer who breaks the conditions of licence at any time after release can be returned to prison without trial.
There have been lifers released after 8 years in exceptional circumstances ,there are others who will never get out.
Every offence and every offender is differant sentencing policy reflects this.

You can get life for non-capital offences such as serial rape.
There is one prisoner in the system who has been such a problem that he will not ever get out yet he only started off with 8 years for robbery.

Ref the farmer who was sent down for shooting a burglar dead and wounding the other - this guy once had a firearms licence which was withdrawn by the police when he had threatened people near his land.The weapon was held illegally.
He might have got away with self defence if he had shot the burglars as they were coming at him but one was hit in the back whilst running away.

The real responsability lies with the ‘Justice’ system which had allowed the burglars to acquire a total of 116 convictions between them for a wide range of property theft convictions without putting them away for a long long time and the Police whose response times were utterly pathetic.

The guy must have felt completely deserted by the law and so took the only logical recourse - to him - given the circumstances.

11

So let’s suppose bj0rn, that somebody randomly decided to kill you, god forbid, and in a previous incident, you’d killed a person who’d slaughtered all you family in front of you. The same punishment for you and the mass murderer of your family? You may think so. I do not and consider that the circumstances must be taken into account when someone is sentenced to a crime, irrespective of the legal nature of that crime.

12

android said:

Except what you’re really getting into here is the natural absurdity of upper-end crimes.

Here’s an example. Person A was running into debt, so he killed his estranged wife and their child in order to collect on their insurance policy.

A terrible, terrible crime; it’s definitely first-degree murder (premeditated murder), so we give him the maximum sentence- life in prison without parole.

Now comes Person B, a hit man. He’s convicted of doing 20 murders for hire.

Now, come up with a sentence for him.

With no death penalty, not much you can do beyond life in prison without parole. So Person B seems to get the same sentence as Person A, even though person B committed a crime 10 times the size of person A. It’s just that Person A did a crime for which we’re giving the maximum penalty, and no matter how much worse Person B’s crimes seem, he can still only get the maximum penalty as well.

The farmer committed first-degree murder. (Taking all that has been written in this thread at face value:) He illegally owned a gun, had threatened to kill intruders before, and then finally killed two unarmed burglars who were trying to flee. This is not a man trying to defend his home; this is a man taking his anger at the police and at burglars out upon someone else. Was the victim a saint? No. Was he right to be angry at someone breaking into his house? Sure. But that didn’t give him the right to kill the burglar, any more than you have the right to hunt down and kill the guy who’s been sleeping with your wife.

It was premeditated (he planned to kill someone, even if there wasn’t a specific someone he planned to kill). Therefore, it’s 1st degree murder, and therefore it carries the maximum penalty. Cameron’s crime may be worse as a ‘random murder’ (explain that to me, if you would), but we can’t give him more than the maximum, right?

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

13

You want weird? How is it that someone in the US can get life for murder, and they can also get life for possessing some cocaine?

14

In America, the law varies from state to state, and also can be pretty eccentric in specific areas. Around here, you have only to show that you thought your life was in danger and you’re off the hook shooting a burglar; whether the burglar was armed or not is irrelevant. The way it works, the burglar has to be in your house, not in the yard, and that’s about it. (Although it might be a bit problematic if the burglar was shot in the back, but not necessarily.) Bottom line, folks need to stay out of other folks’ houses unless invited, they’re taking their lives into their hands and they should know it.

What’s disheartening is hearing about people whose neighbors’ DOGS break into their yards or screened porches, and eat their pets. Can’t do a thing about it legally. If a dog will eat a neighboring dog or cat, it would surely eat a toddler. (Toddler-eating happens with depressing regularity.) Actually, one such person said a policeman privately advised her to buy a gun and shoot the dog if she sees it in her yard. Thanks a lot. If I wanted to worry about animals eating my family, I guess I’d move into the zoo.