An ‘affront to justice’ somebody says somebody said. I was imagining something more along the lines of ‘fucking outrageous’ but I may be old-fashioned.
1 Like
Does the UK have privately run prisons like in the US?
1 Like
Hmmm… I’m not saying that I agree with the changes in the Scottish legal aid, but I don’t think it’s the same thing. The Scottish reform simply added something like a copay for those who qualify for legal aid but are on the higher end of the income spectrum among those who do qualify. It’s basically a sliding scale system of payment rather than an on/off switch. The English reform referred to straight up incentives all legal aid lawyers to push their clients toward pleading guilty no matter what.
Given a choice of the two, I’ll take the Scottish version of reform on this one.
I usually avoid posting while sputtering. Not here.
I don’t think he’s a troll. I suspect he might be autistic or has something else that makes it important that the rules (as he interprets them) are followed.
IMB, the UK currently has 14 privately run prisons (IIRC the goverment owns the facilities but contracts out “services” to private actors).
Everyone is pushed to plead guilty regularly.
From what I understand of plea bargaining, it works like this… whatever you are charged with, the DA throws on as many other charges as possible. Then calculates the chance they will actually convict you based on the merit of the case… and say they determine they get a 10% chance of conviction. They then offer a plea bargain wherein you plead guilty, and get 1/10th the punishment… for example a year in prison, vs waiting in prison for a year to go to trial, then possibly getting convicted of something, and facing 10 years.
Its a great way to coerce a confession out of someone. And best yet… it doesn’t apply to rich people. Rich people make bail, get decent lawyers, and DAs would rather drop charges than lose a court case.
What I remember in Texas were the two detectives that would call spanish speaking immigrants over to their car, then arrest them, then say they were drug dealers. They found out these were all trumped up charges when the detectives disappeared with $300,000 of cocaine and informant money. They were saying they paid informants to bust people, but were just pocketing the money, and they would check cocaine out of the lockup for mock drug deals, and would return sheet rock.
Of course the illegal immigrants weren’t released or anything.
Another excellent example of the Texas justice system was the Houston DA who sent his DNA evidence to a lab that would lie. They’d say… oh… its a 99% certainty that this is the perp, based on DNA evidence, when the real results were 90% likely it wasn’t them.
4 Likes
That’s one of the points I was trying to make.
Both changes are cuts to legal aid. I don’t really want to see cuts in legal aid, but the Scottish version looks to be significantly less bad.
I’m also saying that in general, where there are differences between laws introduced by the Scottish Parliament, and those introduced by Westminster, The Scottish ones seem to be more humane, more sensible, and less blitheringly incompetent.
In conclusion, if anyone feels that they’d like to be rid of the Westminster government and its lying, bullying, spying ways; there’s a referendum next year that you might be interested in.
3 Likes
You must be confused, because the measures the English have taken are equivalent to and no more abhorrent than those taken by the Scots.
If you can’t grok unequal application of analysis to both countries, how can you possibly maintain your ‘reasoned argument’ when you proclaim that staying hobbled to our fractious neighbours down south is necessary for the health of Scotland, ‘just because’.
Edit: Sorry, sarcasm meter off the scale on that one.
Full disclosure, no I do not work for Reddit, nor any “competitors” of BoingBoing.
I’m not entirely sure what significance there is in the specific formatting of my critiques, as you seem to suggest there may be. What might you offer as an alternative to my current order of commentary? Should I instead be burying the lede? Should I be pretending I do not, as the saying so quaintly goes, “have an axe to grind”?
I will admit, I do prefer to comment on what I perceive as faults first, and then move on to the larger matter at hand. If someone links me to a scientific study, I will first examine that study’s rigor and legitimacy, and only afterwards do I engage with whatever point or argument it attempts to put forth.
The same is true when I read about current events and news pieces here on BoingBoing - I first scrutinize the material for any inaccuracies or faults, and then I engage the broader topic. In this particular case, I had every reason to address my critical concerns first - not only were the “quotes” immediately fresh in my mind because they appeared in the closing lines of the article, but their nature was also not immediately clear to me and prompted me to attempt to independently research and confirm or deny their point of origin.
I did not “attack the curators” as you claim, I made a critical point about the quality of the news content I had just consumed. If you cannot distinguish between an ad hominem attack directed at a writer and finding fault with the works they create, you have little basis for making negative assumptions about my or anyone else’s motivations for commenting.
1 Like
I don’t think he’s a trolley. I suspect he might be autistic or has something else that makes it important that the rules (as he interprets them) are followed.
I don’t think you’re qualified to assess the mental health of others. I suspect you might be making an ad hominem attack seeking to equate holding a journalistic piece to certain widely accepted standards with being mentally ill.
I do most emphatically not “support the idea that people are innocent until proven otherwise”; it assumes that there is guilt and that it only needs to be shown. The standard should be “innocent unless proven guilty”
2 Likes
Autism isn’t necessarily to be qualified as a mental illness, my friend.
1 Like
I get your point, but let me say that as a participant in discourse, when the first thing you read is negative commentary on the nature / source / accuracy itself, and that commentary is long-winded (more than five words, say), it’s a turn-off.
That’s what I’m saying.
I’m drawn to read your words because they’re clear and well set out, but am not immune to the sinking feeling that follows the discovery that it’s a moan about xyz. I’d love to read your brief, critical statement delivered with some wit and verve, I’m a critic and I adore criticising, but if para after para is red-lining the initial post, it gets kinda old kinda quick.
Horses for courses.
More than five words is long-winded in your mind, is it? And your complaint isn’t with someone being verbose, but with their being verbose combined with being critical of something? How odd.
What would you suggest instead? Reducing any criticisms I might wish to offer to a scant five words? There’s not much you can say in only five words, and if I’m going to offer criticism, I at least want to be thorough and explain my criticism clearly and fairly.
It’s hardly my concern if you do not find my commentary witty, pithy, or punchy enough for your personal tastes. I’m not here to entertain you with snappy one liners, and what I do have to say is well said - you have said as much yourself. Consequently I do not feel obliged to change my writing to suit your whims, particularly at the expense of clarity of thought or precision of argumentation.
Autism is a neurological disorder, akin to pervasive developmental disorder and schizophrenia. If you prefer to use a different label than “mental illness”, for reasons of political correctness or otherwise, that’s your prerogative.
However, no matter which epithet you grant it, the underlying concept is still the same - you are equating levying journalistic criticism with suffering from a “mental disorder”, or “psychiatric disorder”, or whichever other term you care to employ.
Autism is getting a bit off topic, no?
I’m not the one who brought it up, nor the one who implied someone else suffered from it in an attempt to be smugly insulting, nor the one who then disingenuously tried to pass off the insult as an innocent remark when it was called out as such.
Consequently, any complaints you have on such matters should be directed to NeueHeimat or peregrinus_ bis.
Unsurprisingly, this scenario is a lot more complicated than the guardian reported it.
I just started having a quick read through and the existing pay structure and even the proposed one are quite convoluted.
At the moment the basic fee for a guilty plea is £1,714, while the basic fee where there is no guilty plea is £2,856. See any conflict of interest here?
Then on top of this there are other various fixed fees and weightings per page of evidence, etc.
I’m not bothered about this enough to go through an do various experimental calculations. Would have been nice for the Guardian to have though?
From the existing fee structure, one could argue that there appears to be currently a perverse incentive for lawyers to persude guilty clients to plea not-guilty even with a weak case, which takes up court time and eventually lands their client with a heavier sentence.
(fees I took were from the most serious type of offence).
Indeed. Making the basic fee flat on whether a guilty plea was given, or not, would apear in this very simple scenario to make an early guilty plea 60% more profitable for a lawyer (as opposed to the 75% given in the article.)
Then, just to add another thing that annoys me from the article…
Likewise, in magistrates courts a simple guilty plea [for instance, for common assault] will reward lawyers with a 17% pay increase. This flies in the face of the government’s advertised 17.5% cuts to save £220m from the legal aid budget.
The association said the revised fees would result in some lawyers losing out as much as 65% in some magistrate court cases and up to 73% in some crown court cases. Steven Bird, a London solicitor and LCCSA member, said: "The only conclusion to draw from these figures is the sad truth that the new fee structure is ideological and has nothing to do with austerity. "
So, the changes will both increase pay to lawyers, thus not saving the government money, but then will also reduce money to lawyers in some cases by up to 75% thus saving the government money?
You should have said: “Quotes not real? Me dislike! Grrrrrrrrr-hrrrrrrrr!” Oh, wait, that’s six words.
Frankly, I think your critics are silly in this thread and helped derail the conversation far more than you could have done. I understood the quote as (poorly executed) satire, but it took me a second, because I generally expect quotes to be, y’know, actually quotes, unless indicated otherwise, as in my use of hypothetical quotes in this comment.
The author of the piece could have solved the ambiguity quite easily by saying, “They might as well have said, “If you can’t afford a lawyer…””
1 Like
