JohnG@lt wrote:
Uzique, where your English common law fails, is a failure to account for a mans goods as a product of his time.
Say I were to burn down a man's house and he has no insurance to cover it. This man invested ten full years worth of salary into his home. Assuming an eight hour day with weekends, the man has literally lost three years of his life. They went poof. This isn't even accounting for everything else that was inside the mans home that were also things of value. So, while I can agree that taking a mans life for theft is ludicrously out of line with the crime, I would hardly call theft or attempted theft, a small crime.
However, Castle law, and the threat it represents towards potential criminals is a proven deterrent. It also doesn't leave the victim in a position where they might be injured or killed instead of just robbed in the case of a home invasion. I'd rather have the messy result of a criminals demise rather than put old women and children in harms way just because one feels criminals have some absurd right to life even when they violate the rights of others. As far as I am concerned, if someone breaks into my home, I can not read their mind, and do not know their motives. They could be breaking in to rape my girlfriend or murder me. They forfeit all rights once they enter my home illegally.
what are you talking about? "a failure to account for a man's goods as a product of his time?" what sort of pretentious, completely non-legal piffle is that? a man's 'goods' are classed as
property and statute/case-law serves to protect against a whole-range of
offences against the property. if a man's house burns down... that's arson, not fucking theft, and carries a massively bigger penalty, anyway. renumeration and pecuniary punishments may be part of those punishments (especially in civil courts) in order to compensate and bring a man back to the state he had before the crime (the overall loose-aim of all civil law).
as i said - you cannot relate to our concept of 'fair justice' because of the widespread, casually-accepted proliferation of weapons. breaking and entering or larcenies involving weapons (especially lethal ones) are extremely rare here in the UK. your average suburban housing development will not have any weapon-owning houseowners, nor any weapon-brandishing criminals. the only cases where normally guns become involved is on large estates and farms - and these are the cases where the property-owner has been found liable for unreasonable acts as well as the defendant for criminal ones.
lowing wrote:
Excuse me, can you please put this in laymen's terms?
"the only way you can get away with shooting, harming or taking somebody hostage for perpetrating a crime against you is if you claim a legal defense of diminished responsibility or provocation, as a result of continuous mental harassment."
basically the only way you can get away without punishment for shooting/killing or unlawfully detaining (i.e. not a citizen's arrest - a hostage situation involving possible torture) is if you can get the court to reasonably believe that you were not of a sound mind at the time, i.e. if you were mentally irrational because of previous break-ins (diminished capacity/diminished responsibility), or if you can convince the courts that you felt a genuine and reasonable fear for your well-being/life (self-defense).
Last edited by Uzique (2010-07-11 20:18:11)
