Well, there seems to be no doubt what the (supposedly unbiased) Herald’s official position is on the proposed “three strikes” law. The headline
‘Unjust’ bill means 11,000 per cent rise in prison time
is not exactly studiedly neutral. And making out that Kim Workman comes from “an independent organisation on crime” is simply a bad old-fashioned lie. [...]

In September 2008 I wrote this:
Unfortunately, what this [the repeal of section 59] does to parents is place them in a position of having no clear idea what is an acceptable smack. Worse still, it allows children to threaten their parents, thereby seriously reducing their authority, even if the child has no intention of notifying [...]

The Herald reports today that 39 “minor acts of physical discipline” were brought to the attention of police, resulting in one prosecution and  37 warnings. The article goes on to say:
Deputy Police Commissioner Rob Pope said the figures showed police continued to apply discretion in handling “anti-smacking” cases.
Sadly, Mr. Pope completely misses the point. Absolutely [...]

That, apparently, was the defense that was put forward by the killer of Navtej Singh, the man shot by thugs in his liquor store and left to bleed to death. Anitelea Chan-Kee, the man behind the gun that ended Navtej Singh’s life claims that the killing was “accidental” because he “did not realise the gun was [...]

Looks like the government is set to reduce the legal blood alcohol limit from 0.08 to 0.05 for driving. I have blogged quite extensively about this already so I am not going to add much more. It is not a matter of great note, but the lawyers who are saying that it is the law-abiding [...]

The case of the young man who died from a brain abscess following a open fracture of his skull given to him in a drunken brawl is quite unusual. The defense is probably making much of the fact that the doctor “missed” the fracture in an attempt to pass the “blame” of the death onto [...]

Back from South Africa, anyway. Jet lagged out of my gourd as well.
After a decade away (15 years since emigrating), South Africa now feels like a foreign land to me. The South African government claims that crime has dropped since the Apartheid years but I doubt very much that that is true. Absolutely everyone I [...]

The amphibious one over at Frogblog has pointed out the extraordinary consensus in the blogosphere of the matter of Simon Power’s knee-jerk dismissal of the findings of the Law Commission’s report on Controlling And Regulating Drugs (PDF). While everyone is unanimous (including me) in their opinion that Power has been far too dismissive of the [...]

In what has to be the most bizarre over-reaction I have heard in a long time, the Herald reports that a 12-year-old girl was arrested for scrawling on her desk. That is: properly arrested in handcuffs and dragged off to the police station and given eight hours of community service as her sentence.
Wow.
I realise this [...]

Now here’s an interesting headline…
Ex-UN weapons inspector faces child sex charges
PHILADELPHIA – A longtime UN weapons inspector who blamed a 2001 sex-sting arrest on his criticism of the Iraq war has again been charged in an online child-sex case, and this time he was caught on camera.
Scott Ritter, 48, of Delmar, New York, engaged in a [...]