Sex ban IT man loses appeal – but judge labels order 'unpoliceable' Former IT contractor John O'Neill has lost his appeal against the Sexual Risk Order imposed on him last year – but the judge said the 24 hours' notice he had to give police in advance of having sex was “unpoliceable”. District Judge Adrian Lower, sitting at York Magistrates' Court on Friday, refused to discharge the order …
Too lax. You should be born on the list and only struck off and pardoned if you die a virgin or lop your own cock off.
Anyone convicted of an offense should be highlighted in bold.
Anyone with a beard and glasses should be in italic.
Anyone that works for the BBC should go on their own list which will be left alone for 30 years.
Anyone that wears a tracksuit, smokes cigars and drives a gold bentley should go on a pre-order list for a cardboard headstone to save on destruction costs when they're outed.
"so do we wait until he kills someone?"
No, we have this process where we arrest the guy, have this thing called a "trial" where the people who think he should be in jail try to convince a jury of that, and if they cant then they let him go.
Maybe you have heard of this system, it's called "justice"
"Maybe you have heard of this system, it's called 'justice'" It may be called the justice system but it is fallible. The level of proof required for a conviction is quite high. Which means that some guilty people are found not guilty. The victims in those cases will probably tell you they have not received justice.
There is always going to be trade off between finding people who have committed a crime 'not guilty' and stopping innocent people from being convicted. It seems that currently the balance is set so that few innocents are convicted which means quite a few guilty are found not guilty. I think many/most people agree that this is an appropriate balance.
Unfortunately some crimes are committed and there is little if any evidence.
This case certainly seems a worrying precedence. I wonder if we were in court at the original trial or on the jury what we'd think of the court Order.
n.b. In Scotland you can have verdicts of Not Guilty, Guilty and Not Proven!
Precrime doesn't exist yet.
Actualy, yes, it does. However, it doesn't appear to be working too well as of yet: Chicago’s predictive policing tool just failed a major test
Precrime kind of exists.
Various police departments have found that by predicting where trouble is most likely to happen and putting patrols in that area at that time, it generally doesn't. Just the presence of police is enough to disrupt criminal behaviour in most cases
Unfortunately this doesn't get recorded as arrests so isn't called a success by politicians who "must get tough on crime"
Actually it does, at least to a certain extent. There are multiple versions of "conspiracy" crimes. By definition it criminalizes the act of you thinking about and preparing to commit a crime before you actually do it. The problem as far as the cops are concerned (not anyone interested in individual rights and justice) is that it is very hard to get a conviction from a jury when trying someone for conspiracy. Seems to me this SRO stuff you have in Britain is an end run around your individual rights protections.
>Don't conspiracy crimes generally have more than one defendant?
Or at least some, er, conspiracy. i.e. some active planning & preparation. I'm not sure just having thoughts about things which are illegal is illegal.
Who hasn't had a violent fantasy about the person in front of them doing 20 below the limit in the outside lane?
"The problem as far as the cops are concerned (not anyone interested in individual rights and justice) is that it is very hard to get a conviction from a jury when trying someone for conspiracy."
However the police do find it useful to do a "fishing expedition" by arresting someone "on suspicion of conspiracy to...". They hope the search that the arrest enables will find some evidence of real crime. This can happen if you have a social connection to a suspect in an investigation that is going nowhere. If they find nothing then they don't proceed to a charge for the purported conspiracy.
Any proven conspiracy offence used to be regarded extremely seriously by the courts - irrespective of what the conspiracy was supposed to be about. IIRC before the Blair government made everything an "arrestable" offence - the "suspicion of conspiracy to..." was a safe way to make an arrest of apparently innocent people.
So we wait until he kills someone?
Yes, we do have to wait. We have this wonderful thing called "the law" which is designed to punish people for doing stuff wrong, like installing windows Vista on their aunts laptop. We have police officers who are a deterrent to people who want to break the law, we also have punishment as a deterrent for people (and if they break the law, as a punishment).
What we have here is a case of a man who has not broken any laws, sure, he may be a bit of a weirdo, but being weird is not against the law. We cannot punish him for not breaking the law. Sure, if there was a major chance he was going to break the law, we could arrest him and charge him, but we're not, we're just punishing him for a crime he has not done, and that is wrong.
If they think he is dangerous enough to warrant some kind of supervision, then he needs to be tried under the law so that he could have the ability in court to present his case with the law presenting their case and a verdict reached, not this.
"If they think he is dangerous enough to warrant some kind of supervision, then he needs to be tried under the law so that he could have the ability in court to present his case with the law presenting their case and a verdict reached, not this."
While this action started from the position of him being under the order - Is that not what has just happened?
> Precrime is now a thing.
And this is new? What about IRA internment? Guantanamo bay? Control orders?
Mind you, as Sideshow Bob said:
> I am presently incarcerated, imprisoned for a crime I did not even commit. "Attempted murder" - now honestly, did they ever give anyone a Nobel prize for "attempted chemistry?"
> So we wait until he kills someone?
No. You fucking jail everyone just in case.
More helpfully to you, I hope: in the event that a person may be considered a risk to himself or the community at large, that's were social services get involved. Police is supposed to be a last resort, not the very first stop.
They downsized social services some years ago.
The police are always moaning that they are now social workers as well as law enforcers.
The discharge provisions are what you should look at: The court cannot discharge the order. It can only be discharged by agreement between the person AND the police,or by the police. Not the court who imposed it, without police consent.
And while he has committed no offence, breach of the order is an offence and carries a custodial sentence.
"So we wait until he kills someone?"
Have you actually read the article and the linked articles?
What has happened here is that this guy confessed to his GP (General Practitioner, so his doctor (as a non-English speaker I actually had to look this up)) about his wild sexual fantasies and that he wasn't too sure that he didn't rape someone. Basically: during the past 12 months he never really asked his girlfriend(s?) if they agreed. So his doctor reported him.
Then it got out that he does show some odd behaviour. Even getting into fights himself (it is unspecified if this is with males or females) and taking some things to extremes. So you won't hear me say that everything is totally normal here.
However...
He was tried and I'm pretty sure that his girlfriends were also part of that trial. Surely that would be the best evidence they had against him? But even despite all that a jury cleared him of all charges. Now, take note: they cleared him while he himself was the one who brought it all up: he wasn't sure the sex was consensual.
And after that it was the Judge who suddenly started the hate campaign; stating how this guy was a very dangerous man in his eyes.
Here is my problem with the whole thing: for all I know that judge could be someone who totally despises SM or any forms of kinky sex. Either because he's just disgusted with it, or because of other personal issues he has with it (religion?). Leading up to this guy getting convicted merely because 1 individual considers him dangerous, even though all the evidence in the trial itself has been taken into account by a jury and they still acquitted him.
Do you honestly call that justice?
Let's also not forget that it was he himself who sought help in the first place! Instead of trying to help him his doctor apparently called the cops on him. So here's my real problem: what if all this drives him over the edge and things go downhill from here? Do you honestly believe that he'll ever try to seek medical help again?
And who's fault would that be, hmm? Once again: he fessed up himself! So he has a clear understanding of right and wrong in my opinion and better yet: also acted on it! As a result he gets condemned without proper evidence because of one man.
This is a witch hunt in my opinion.
I've considered myself a responsible anarchist who was capable and ready to perform acts so desperately needed for society to prune the gene pool, that said this set of circumstances will demand I abandon that concept. This is not the gentleman who I want as a neighbor but if he hasn't been convicted leave'm alone till you have. More like it's time to weed put the "you wouldn't be here if you hadn't done something" mentality.
The recent Karl Urban one was very good, but we only saw a bit of MegaCity One - and other than him passing Anderson's probation, it was presented as being just another day for Dredd. A great shame that no sequels are planned, though Karl Urban is keen - even suggesting that he could do one in a decade or two, portraying different parts of Dredd's career.
The Stallone film, whilst blaspheming, is worth watching for the production design and more ambitious scope - we go to Cursed Earth, even if its poorly realised. Stallone has since apologised for not making the film as it should have been.
Still, we'll always have RoboCop (emotionless lawman in a satirised world), and Dirty Harry (Clint being an influence on Dredd)
what's not mentioned here is that the guy went to his GP.. was he looking for treatment? why else would he tell these things to his GP?
It sounds like this guy needs treatment more than court orders, that's far more likely to end up with the right result of preventing him from raping/abusing women. Frankly how would a court order achieve that? if he were so inclined he could ignore the court order completely and go where his fantasies take him.
The law in this country seems to be skewed to devastating an accused persons life before any evidence is produced or proven in a court of law. Punish first, ask questions later mentality seems to prevail..
"The law in this country seems to be skewed to devastating an accused persons life before any evidence is produced or proven in a court of law. Punish first, ask questions later mentality seems to prevail.."
It does now. Quite some time ago it was the case that newspapers etc did not dare to publish information about a court case prior to it being heard in court for fear of the courts dragging the newspaper in for contempt of court, as the courts seemed to be of the opinion that they decided who was innocent or guilty, not a court of public opinion which has been given a story by one half of a case, without perhaps having the facts.
If courts started dragging editors in for contempt of court again then it'd change pretty switftly.
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