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| Mister James |
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 Mister James I want to believe!

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 Posted: 15:15 - 10 Sep 2006 Post subject: Suicide - should we allow Huntly etc to kill themselves? |
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/09/10/do1001.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/09/10/ixopinion.html
A very interesting editorial in the Torygraph, and one that sums up my views pretty well. We often wonder at work whether we are in breach of people's human rights when we intervene in self-harm incidents.
I've personally cut down half a dozen people that would have died had I not been alerted in time, and have assisted in dealing with dozens upon dozens of other cases involving cutting/hanging/strangulation attempts. Most of them, in all fairness, turn around a few days later and thank us for stopping them - which to my mind justifies my actions - but does that really apply to lifers who will never be released back into society. Discuss:
| Quote: | Huntley and Brady want to die. Good. Let them
By Alasdair Palmer
Ian Huntley, the man who murdered the two 10-year-old girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, was sentenced to "a minimum of 40 years in prison". The prisoners with whom he is incarcerated have turned an existence of stupefying futility and boredom into a living hell: Huntley knows he is hated, and he knows that every other prisoner is trying to spit at him or poison his food, smash his face and break his bones.
He has reacted by attempting suicide. He secreted a number of sleeping pills, took them all at once, and fell into a coma. But he was found in time, had his stomach pumped and was resuscitated: he is expected to make a full recovery.
Huntley has been characterised as vile, manipulative and irredeemably evil, even by some of the psychiatrists who examined him. If there is a good reason why his life should be prolonged by outside intervention, it has yet to be articulated: and I say that as a staunch opponent of capital punishment.
The grounds for believing that the state should not punish people by killing them are twofold. First, there is no evidence that it has any significant deterrent effect on murderers or other serious criminals. Surveys from America demonstrate that those states which execute people usually have higher murder rates than those which do not.
Second, there is no possibility of making recompense when the inevitable mistakes are made and innocent people are executed. It was that thought which persuaded Michael Howard, when he was home secretary, to vote against the reintroduction of the death penalty: he knew it was a statistical certainty that if there were to be a policy of executing murderers, sooner or later he or one of his successors would sign a warrant sending an innocent man to his death. Mr Howard did not want to be responsible for that.
Even if you think, as I do, that Huntley's crimes are so horrible that the world would be a better place if he were now dead, there are solid practical reasons for believing that we should not have a policy of punishing killers by cold-bloodedly killing them. If Huntley decides to try to end his own life, however, that is a very different matter. The exercise of state power, which always requires a rational justification, is not involved when he kills himself; it is deployed in forcing him to stay alive. What possible purpose is served by making it impossible for him to commit suicide?
Advocates of forced resuscitation say that it ensures that Huntley cannot "cheat justice". What they don't do is explain how making him live serves the cause of justice. It seems to me to be simply an exercise in sadism. Some people evidently believe that Huntley deserves to be tortured for the rest of his natural life. That response is understandable, it is what I might feel if he had murdered my children, but it's not a call for justice. No sane person thinks that torturing someone until they die can ever be a part of fair and just punishment.
Then there is the factor of cost. Putting Huntley on permanent suicide watch will require, according to the Prisoner Officers' Association (POA), spending between £300,000 and £500,000 extra on him every year. The central difficulty for those who think that money is well spent is to identify the benefit that will be gained by it. There is no benefit to Huntley: he wants to be dead. And there is no benefit to the rest of us either: most of us feel it would be an improvement if he were dead.
Even if we do not, the result of ensuring that he cannot kill himself is that we, as a society, lose £500,000 a year. If he lives for 10 years thanks to the heroic intervention of the POA and prison doctors, that amounts to £5 million, or £10 million if they keep him from going over the edge for 20.
That £10 million could have been spent on providing extra hospital beds for blameless people, or on hiring more teachers for schools, or even, perhaps, on closer monitoring of paedophiles to ensure that, in future, it is less likely that a man such as Huntley will be employed as a school caretaker where he can gain the trust of children like Jessica and Holly and then murder them.
Some Christians will insist that no man is beyond redemption. The trouble with that optimistic belief is that it is contradicted by everything we know about men such as Ian Huntley. Religious conviction should, any way, not be the basis of the criminal law: suicide was rightly decriminalised nearly 50 years ago, although it is quite clearly anathematised in the Bible (along with a few other things that most of us accept should be legal in the privacy of one's home).
It is sometimes said that "as a civilised society", we have a duty to ensure that criminals such as Huntley do not commit suicide. But there is nothing civilised about forcing Huntley to live: the process of keeping someone alive who wants to die is unavoidably barbaric, involving, as it must, the continuance of preventable suffering, and acts of violence such as force-feeding.
Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, has said that he wants to die, and has attempted suicide several times. The authorities have intervened to ensure his attempts have been unsuccessful. He has been kept from starving himself to death by being force-fed. Brady is an even more repulsive monster than Huntley. No one would mourn his death. Nothing worthwhile is achieved by the violence that has been used to continue his life. It is no part of anyone's moral duty to ensure that Huntley and Brady are tortured in this way.
Suggesting that Huntley should be allowed to die is not, of course, to suggest that he should be encouraged to kill himself or provided with the materials he needs to do it. There is a difference between killing someone, which should not be permitted, and letting someone die, which can sometimes be the right thing to do.
The state should let Huntley die because he wants to die – his attempts at self-slaughter are the proof of that commitment — and the rest of us have no interest at all in his continued existence. To deploy the state's power and resources to keep him alive is pointless: it is an irrational waste of both.
The policy of not reviving those who have committed particularly terrible crimes when they attempt to kill themselves would certainly generate problems. The most basic one is summed up in the question: where do we draw the line? How bad does a person's crime have to be before we say: what you have done is so awful that if you try to kill yourself we won't revive you? It sounds like an unanswerable question, but it isn't. There are plenty of candidates for crimes of the requisite heinousness: the murder of children is one.
It is true that wherever you draw the line, there will be cases on either side of it that will make you think the line should be drawn in a different place. That, however, is not an objection to the policy, because the same is true, not just for the cut-off point for abortion, but for practically every legal concept: in most of them, from the definition of murder and theft to the appropriate punishment for fraud or the rules for allocating which of a divorcing couple should be given custody of the children, there are always "hard cases".
The appropriate response to discovering them is not to give up on the concept or the policy that uses it. It's to try to ensure that it is rationally, fairly and sensibly implemented: three adjectives that, admittedly, do not often describe the way government officials behave.
Still, the ineradicable stupidity of government officials would have few serious consequences if we adopted the policy of not resuscitating child killers. If Huntley or Brady succeed the next time they attempt suicide because the POA has gone on strike, will anyone really have any reason to do anything except cheer? |
____________________ >Soultrader Mister James, I bet you are a copper
>Bazza Wow. Eyes like a shithouse rat, you... |
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| mr jamez |
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 mr jamez World Chat Champion

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 McJamweasel BCF Junkie

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| NinjaBoy |
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 NinjaBoy Scooby Slapper

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 Posted: 16:06 - 10 Sep 2006 Post subject: |
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I said about this in a recent post, our prisons are full and people like this are clogging up vital cells.
I know they're humans, have a life, and deserve to face the punishment for doing such cruel things.
But seriously, we know they're going to die one way or the other, one way is to keep them in our cells (payed for by the tax payer) and the other is grant them at least one wish, and let them die NOW.
Easy answer if you ask me  ____________________ .: NinjaBoy :. |
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| Mister James |
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 Mister James I want to believe!

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 Posted: 16:24 - 10 Sep 2006 Post subject: |
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| McJamweasel wrote: | Bollocks to letting them die, why should he be allowed to take the easy way out? Why should he be allowed to make the choice on how he ends his prison term? He's been given the sentance, now he deserves to serve it.
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Did you see the estimate by the Prison Officers' Association that it costs up to £500k a year to keep him on a suicide watch? That's more than 10 times what it costs to keep your average serious con locked up. That adds up to tens of millions if he lives out a normal life-span. Should intangible and unseen revenge really cost the state - and thus you and me - so much?
| Quote: |
| Mister James wrote: | We often wonder at work whether we are in breach of people's human rights when we intervene in self-harm incidents. |
Why should child murdering scum have any human rights? They are in prison as a punishment, and that should stand regardless of their wishes. |
While many of the guys at my place are child murderers, child molesters, rapists and kidnappers, they have technically served their sentences and are not classified as prisoners under UK law - despite being detained in a secure facility. They will all eventually be released, either back into the UK (yay!) or put on planes and sent home.
We cannot force them to have medical treatment (except where it puts others' health at risk) but we are required by law to save their lives if they attempt to kill themselves - to me it's a bit of contradiction.
Naturally, 9/10 cases of self-harm in our centre are (IMHO) pure manipulation rather than genuine attempts to end their lives, but what should we be doing about the other 1/10? ____________________ >Soultrader Mister James, I bet you are a copper
>Bazza Wow. Eyes like a shithouse rat, you... |
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| Louise |
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 Louise World Chat Champion

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 Posted: 17:06 - 10 Sep 2006 Post subject: |
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I want him to have the most painfull death as possible. But on the other hand I want him to serve his life in Prison.
Gose either way for me.
Bastard, just let him in the street - Let people do him over  |
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 JonB Afraid of Mileage

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 Mister James I want to believe!

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 Mister James I want to believe!

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| Mister James |
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 Mister James I want to believe!

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 Posted: 23:56 - 10 Sep 2006 Post subject: |
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He probably does. The IEP system works on the basis of your behaviour in the prison system, not the behaviour that got you into it. If he has followed all lawful instructions and kept his head down, he is entitled to Enhanced regime under the Prison Rules - which are enforced by an act of parliment.
My understanding is that his watch had been dropped recently following a 2053sh review (ACCT in the HMPs) by prison staff - which considering the high-profile nature of the case would have included health care professionals. They obviously concluded that he was suitable for a reduced level of observations, and they were probably right to drop them.
Constant watches are not only annoying for the staff involved, they often cause more problems than they solve. Can you imagine a big hairy-arsed screw watching you from arms length 24/7, watching you in the shower, having a dump, while you try and sleep, rustling papers and watching films in your room at 4am? Not fun, and a pain in the arse for the nominated officer. He will obviously be on one of those now - hence (once again) the point of the article which everyone seems to have missed. ____________________ >Soultrader Mister James, I bet you are a copper
>Bazza Wow. Eyes like a shithouse rat, you... |
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 bazza World Chat Champion
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 Posted: 13:14 - 11 Sep 2006 Post subject: |
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Stick 'em in all together in a house, BB stylee. No guards, no medics.
 ____________________ "That's it. You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college."
'98 Ducati 750SS, '08 Suzuki GSX650F ©2004-2014, Bazza's Harmless Banter |
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 Posted: 14:41 - 11 Sep 2006 Post subject: |
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I say fine, let the bastard commit suicide, but he doesn't get to choose how it happens, oh no, that is left down to the people he has hurt.
Lets see how eager he is to take is own life then shall we?
As far as keeping cons that have committed peadophillia crimes in separate wings 'for their own safety' is concerned, screw that too....
Put them in the general population, make it public and see if it has any effect on the amount of crimes commited in that sector....  ____________________ You will become my force of retribution. Where you tread, doom will follow. Go now and claim your destiny |
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| Annabella |
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 Annabella Like a person, only smaller

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 Posted: 10:19 - 12 Sep 2006 Post subject: |
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I feel quite strongly about this and will try to avoid ranting.
Forcing someone like Huntley to remain alive is to my mind quite frankly sick. My initial reaction to his suicide was "That's the easy way out, he should suffer", but forcing him to suffer makes us no better than him.
The additional cost to keep him alive is unjustifiable when we can't afford to treat cancer patients with the most up to date treatment, and we can't afford to pay our dentists enough to promote working for the NHS (topical selection). Half a million pounds - that's nearly enough to build a new health centre - imagine that, a new health centre EVERY year that could help hundreds and thousands of people to have a better quality of life just for the loss of one sick criminal's life.... ____________________ Avast! Pirates ahoy!
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Old Thread Alert!
The last post was made 19 years, 95 days ago. Instead of replying here, would creating a new thread be more useful? |
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