“Tough on Crime”?

Do you feel, as I do, that those convicted by our legal system are frequently ‘let off’ with too light a sentence? Do you think, as the mass media would like you to believe, that our judiciary is to blame? Read on…..

“It used to be the judge who decided on the sentence after an offender was convicted, although the choice was limited. At the beginning of the 19th century there were 220 offences that carried the death penalty and the task for the judge was to decide whether to commute this to flogging and, if so, how many strokes of the cat o’9 tails should be administered. When imprisonment replaced these more robust punishments Parliament usually enacted a maximum sentence for particular offences, leaving it to the judge to decide the appropriate sentence within that maximum.

“More recently Parliament has legislated over what some consider to be the judges’ territory by laying down rules that significantly restrict the judge’s discretion. Statutes provide alternatives to custody – fines and a wide variety of community punishments. Judges are directed which to choose. We are forbidden to impose a sentence of imprisonment if there is a viable alternative and, if we do impose a sentence of imprisonment, we are directed that it must be the shortest commensurate with the seriousness of the offence. The sentence that we impose will not normally be carried out, for in most cases statute provides that the offender is to be released on licence after he has served half the term of imprisonment imposed. [emphasis mine]

“But the media are always on the look-out for a sentence that they can castigate as ‘letting an offender walk free’. A few months ago the Recorder of Cardiff had to sentence a sex offender who had carried off a young girl in his van and subjected her to a serious indecent assault. He ruled that he was a dangerous offender and imposed one of the new indeterminate sentences, directing that he would have to serve at least 5 years before he could even be considered for release. This brought a storm of press protest with comments such as ‘judge allows sex beast to walk free after 5 years’. The Home Secretary commented publicly that he considered the sentence ‘unduly lenient’. What the press did not say was that there was no likelihood that this offender would be released after 5 years because this would not be considered safe. The 5 year 108 day minimum term had been correctly calculated by the judge, who was subject to the constraints that I described earlier. It represented an 18 year sentence, discounted by one third to give credit for the fact that the offender had pleaded guilty and then halved to reflect the fact that prisoners who are not dangerous are released on licence when they have served half their sentence, and finally reduced to reflect time served on remand.”

[The text quoted above is taken from http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/docs/speeches/lcj260207.pdf]

Global Warming

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Don’t believe everything politicians and the mass media tell you!

Ten facts about global warming:
1. Britain is one degree Celsius cooler now than it was at the time of the Domesday book.
2. Greenland got its name from the verdant pastures that attracted the Norse settlers under Eric the Red in 986. They carried on their normal way of life (based on cattle, grain, hay and herring) for 300 years until the Little Ice Age, when they were driven off by the encroaching ice and the Inuit took over. The ice and the Inuit are still there.
3. Carbon dioxide is a minor greenhouse gas. In the atmosphere there is over a hundred times the concentration of water vapour, which is the dominant greenhouse gas.
4. Without the Greenhouse Effect there would be no life on Earth.
5. Temperature measurements by satellite, radio sonde balloons and well maintained rural surface stations in the West show no significant warming.
6. The evidence of significant warming comes from surface stations that are probably affected by a variety of factors that contaminate the data.
7. Computer models of the climate are worthless, as they are based on many assumptions about interactions between climate factors that are still unknown to science. They are generally unstable and chaotic, giving a wide variety of answers depending on the input assumptions.
8. The Kyoto agreement would have a devastating effect on the world economy but, since carbon dioxide is a minor greenhouse gas, an undetectable effect on the climate.
9. The IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has been the main engine for promoting the global warming scare. It has become notorious for its corrupt practices of doctoring its reports and executive summaries, after they have been approved by the participating scientists, to conform to its political objectives.
10. The really big lie about man-made global warming is that almost all scientists accept it. More than 4,000 scientists from 106 countries, including 72 Nobel prize winners, signed the Heidelberg Appeal (1992), calling for a rational scientific approach to environmental problems. Many senior scientists have also supported The Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming (1992), The Leipzig Declaration (1997) and finally the Oregon Petition (199 which received the signatures of over 19,000 scientists.
[text above taken from "Ten facts about global warming THEY don’t want you to know"]

Don’t just take me on trust either! Below are several links where you can check the facts and figures for yourself.

Greenhouse, global warming - and some facts

Is human activity warming the Earth or do recent signs of climate change signal natural variations?

Global warming started long before the “Industrial Revolution” and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Global warming began 18,000 years ago …

Just how much of the “Greenhouse Effect” is caused by human activity?

Have the global temperature trends published by the IPCC been distorted by purely local warmth from Urban Heat Islands?