Ten years?
hopefully after ten years he'll serve the rest of his sentence in an Iraqi prison where I'm sure he'd receive a warm reception.
A British businessman who netted an estimated £60m selling cheap US novelty dowsing rods as sophisticated bomb and drug sniffing devices for up to $30,000 apiece has been jailed for 10 years. Crown prosecutors claim James McCormick, 57, used a combination of salesmanship and bribery to sell a range of Advanced Detection …
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FFS. this guy killed ten times more than Shipman just to make a quick buck and he gets a measly 10 years?!
Rulings like this make me sick to the stomach, I'd have given him life without parole + 50 for what he has done.
Make it the extra vicious Federal prisons in the US to boot, not the cushy "free satellite and 3 meals" UK ones.
And take away his ill gotten gains and donate them to Iraq veterans or something.
Shame we don't have the death penalty in the UK any more, I can't think of a more deserving candidate.
AC/DC
The 10 year sentence was the maximum term the judge could hand down. I've no doubt that if he could have put the fucker away for life he would have.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your POV) the law prescribes maximum penalties which judges cannot exceed, however much they'd like to. So 10 years was as much as this guy could be put away for.
I wouldn't be surprised though, to see extradition proceedings initiated by Iraq and other countries once his release date approaches, though. Not to mention he's seriously pissed off some military forces who aren't exactly noted for their forbearance and mercy. I think 10 years of chokey will be the least of his troubles.
I agree maximums are important, but there should be a proviso for cases like this where the judge can refer it to a higher court for a longer time in the slammer. A law can never be written to cover all possible infringements, the judges are allowed some small freedom on interpretation to assist with this but in a case like this there definately should be a process for referal, with safeguards.
A case in point is 'vehicular manslaughter', if the driver is drunk or on their cell phone, that should be murder (a clear decision to perform an innappropriate act), or at least double the tarrif for VM.
I know what you mean, but (leaving aside the fact that vehicular manslaughter/homicide doesn't exist in the UK) he was convicted of fraud, becuase that's what the judge here had the ability to do. If you want him to serve time for the *deaths* that he caused, I agree, but that is something that should be dealt with by those countries *where* they occurred and after he is extradited to them to face trial (which I would wholeheartedly support). We can't just make up laws on the fly when we find the existing ones inconvenient; then they wouldn't be laws at all.
Regarding your example, we actually already have specific provision for manslaughter as a consequence of an unlawful act - have a butcher's at http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/h_to_k/homicide_murder_and_manslaughter/ , specifically the section on Unlawful Act Manslaughter.
"I wouldn't be surprised though, to see extradition proceedings initiated by Iraq and other countries once his release date approaches, though. "
You know that he couldn't be extradited from any member-state of the EU to any country where he would be in jeopardy of receiving the death penalty, right?
In addition to the EU law, most of the member-states of the EU have had their own laws about this too. Because it is just so fucking important to the bourgeois conscience that the lives of murderers and their ilk be protected....
The risk was there, to be sure, but is there any evidence anyone really died because of this? Conning or bribing the guy in charge of buying tech for a government is one thing, but I suspect in many if not all cases somewhere between that guy and the guy whose life is actually in danger, someone had enough sense to quietly stick it on a shelf.
Of COURSE they were tested - by people in on the scam. If he had sold them totally above board, he probably wouldn't be in nearly as much trouble, or at least the governments would have a lot harder time making a case. But he had to go and bribe officials into accepting the devices, running right in the face of laws like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (or rather the UK equivalent).
The scam is so transparent and pathetic (the "ionic balance chips" are photographs of what you want to detect, printed on cardboard). When you run the bingo board on Maki Naro's "Quackery Red Flag" comic, and you aren't even medicine, something is very, very wrong.
http://sci-ence.org/red-flags2/
If the buyers were that stupid then the fault is theirs. This guy deserves pain but not nearly as much as the idiots that bought products that evidently *could* *not* work. Testing would have shown that. Common sense would have shown that.
I'm with ecofeco; the buyers must have benefitted and they should get the bulk of the punishment (yeah, right). Then he trod on some toes and it got political so he got publicly strung up. Some score is being conveniently settled, that's all.
It stinks in all directions.
If the buyers were that stupid then the fault is theirs.
So what you are saying is that fraud is OK if the victims are too stupid to know they are being defrauded. Sir, you are a dangerous moron, what next? Perhaps you'd like to see handicapped people sterilised or anybody with an IQ below 90 locked up for their own good?
Everybody regardless of their mental aptitude is entitled to the same protection under the law and if anything it is incumbent on society to protect those least able to protect themselves, not as you seem to think, leave then to fend for themselves against whatever travails the world throws at them.
Fraud *is officially* declared to be OK. The Obama administration has gone to town on legalizing* financial fraud thus making it a viable and scalable business model, Globally.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214
People who matter obviously stopped giving a shit several years ago, "society" is following their lead!
*) First by actively ignoring fraud, then by licensing via settlements instead of jail.
> So what you are saying is that fraud is OK if the victims are too stupid to know they are being defrauded
if the 'victim' is a government or government-linked organisation then it's a bit different from someone's age-befuddled nan. If you can't tell the difference then perhaps I'm not the moron here.
> Perhaps you'd like to see handicapped people sterilised or anybody with an IQ below 90 locked up for their own good?
You forgot to accuse me of homophobia, anti-semetism, animal abuse and supporting genocide. All of which were equally not mentioned in my original post.
> Everybody regardless of their mental aptitude is entitled to the same protection under the law
'Everybody' is not the typical buyer of these pieces of junk. You seem to have totally missed this. Try reading the article.
And as an aside, if you make the world safe for fools then you end up with a world of fools. Not mental debilitation but wilful, avoidable, and deliberate folding-up-the-brain-and-putting-it-away fools.
Actually BG, it's _you_ who need to re-read the article since it pretty plainly states that higher ups (i.e. foreign gov't officials) involved in the purchases were bribed and so in on the scam. The people using them were the injured parties, perhaps literally, and so he does indeed deserve much more than the judge was able to give him.
It seems to me that the buyer weren't that stupid (at least to fall for the scam). From the last paragraph it looks like a lot were corrupt sods who were willing to line their own pockets, because they didn't care about the poor sods who were going to be on the front line, and knew it wasn't going to be them working that front line.
Would have been interesting to see which ones had personal bodyguards relying on these, or whether they were using something different.
Of course the purchasers didn't test them. They were no doubt getting a large bung. Then they handed the useless toys to their security people who of course couldn't blow the whistle without getting their heads blown off into the bargain, so they had to go along with the subterfuge. In any case it didn't really matter that the things didn't work as long as they either deterred the bombers or gave the plebs a false sense of security.