Monday, May 23, 2005

Busy

Sometime today, I am likely to be locked in a small room with 11 other people and denied access to the internet. Normal service should hopefully resume tuesday evening.

There are various things I'd like to comment on - the Blackball vigilantes, the Listener piece on class in New Zealand, the police-rape investigation's descent into secrecy - but it'll have to wait.

7 comments:

  1. Go with whatever Henry Fonda says.

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  2. i bet this is all down to a couple of stupid people who do not grasp the simple concept of innocent until proven guilty. That was the clincher for the jury i sat on - worryingly the woman who stuck to her guns for the longest (that he hadn't proven he was innocent) was on her fourth jury...

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  3. Which is why juries are dodgy.
    Lets go continental and just use a pannel of investigative judges (or lawyers if you want to save money).
    It would be good to be sure the people making the decisions understood the system

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  4. The right to trial by one's peers is made problematic by the propensity of one's peers to be dumbasses? The question is, are judges necessarily any better?

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  5. i recall a disturbing Legal Ethics lecture when one of my fellow students stated very boldly that judges should never be questioned because they are "the cream of our society" - he was speaking against rights of appeal. The extra worrying thing was that I knew this guy was repeating Ethics (which is necessary at UOA to get bar admittance). But he'd already made it through most of law school *shudder*

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  6. dc_red,

    Whatever criteria you use (for example being a dumbass) for being a poor judge should obviously be used as a criteria for selecting those judges or part of judge training.
    In the same way that doctors are indeed better at giving medical treatment than random people off the street.

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  7. Genius - many is the time I've wanted to cry "physician heal thyself" when confronted with gross incompetence in a GP's office or emergency room.

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