But it is clear that the kid brought about his own downfall.
He hasn't been convicted of anything, and it smells like the Met will be having to get its chequebook out again. Then he will not have brought about his own downfall, but skillfully enacted Operation Just-Enough-Rope.
Even Hitler had more restraint at mass slaughter and oppression than the communists.
Ignoring, for one moment, the fact that I'm aiding and abetting a Godwin here. Hitler didn't kill more people because he didn't have the chance - he'd have gradually killed off the existing populations of most of Eastern Europe and Asia just as soon as he had sufficient Aryans to replace them, given the opportunity. Stalin got another 10 years after the war to keep bumping people off, and he wasn't fighting a war at the time.
No, a police officer cannot search someone without reasonable suspicion, consent is irrelevent. It means that they can't just go up to random people in the street (caveat below) and ask to search them, and their consent make the search lawful. The search has to be independently lawful, and whether someone who wasn't qualified to know if it was lawful gave consent isn't a consideration.
The caveat is Section 44 searches which are supposed to be used for anti-terrorist purposes, which don't require reasonable suspicion, but do require the area that they take place in to be designated by the secretary of state. Now, in practice, London has been designated permanently, on a rolling 28 day (the maximum time) authorization for years. However, recently it has been discovered that quite a few of the other authorizations given elsewhere in the country were illegal (for instance, because someone messed up the dates and a 29 day authorization was issued). In one case around 800 searches were made under just one of those orders. Those searches will have been illegal; there is no leeway to argue that because the people searched peacefully allowed themselves to be searched at the time, they gave their consent and so no actual legal authority to make the search was necessaary.
The whole thing has been smothered in spin and misinformation. Most of this was admissible in court, and the prosecution consisted mostly of the prosecutor using a character assasination of the defendants of his own concoction (not even getting a witness to put their ass on the line to give the character assasination as actual evidence). In the mean time, the only 'evidence' presented was a knife which was said to have DNA on it from both Knox and the victim (but in such a small quantity that the entire sample was destroyed by the first test, so it couldn't be verified) which came from the house which they both shared. i.e. not really evidence of anything at all.
Truth be told, I don't know if they did it or not, but what I do know is that, of the information which filtered back through the media as far as me, there just wasn't sufficient evidence to convict anyone of anything. I suspect that the next place that they will be going after their mandatory appeals (if they don't get released quietly then) is Strasbourg to give the Italian government a solid kicking.
I also suspect that the only reason they were found guilty was the judges and jury not wanting to disappoint everybody by leaving this high-profile case unconcluded. We saw the same thing in the UK with the Barry George case; flimsy evidence, far-fetched story, media been linking his name to the case for a year or more, inevitable conviction which turns out to be junk. Shipman, Huntley, Wright, Whiting, George; With a high-profile case and a year or more of the media regularly linking the name of the main suspect with the case, they rarely fail to get a conviction. The media can make sure to say 'suspect' every time, but if you tell me that it doesn't influence the jury ("they've know it was this guy for a year, why would they be prosecuting him if he didn't do it?") I won't believe you. I don't believe that any jury can be entirely free of the tendency to want such a sensational story to be true and therefore to 'make' it true.
There is, presumably, someone in the food chain who is elected, either the peson who appoints the prosecutor, or the person who appoints the person who appoints the prosecutor, or the person who appoints the person who appoints the person who appoints the prosecutor, or... well, you get the picture.
In any case, the Italian judicial system is a complete joke. We should never have let them have their own country.
maybe they wanted to return fire; try and get the case re-opened, show e360's filings to have been utterly false*, and press for e360 to be smacked upside its head. Now that the appeals court has refused to re-open the case, they'll probably just disappear again.
Once Spamhaus was involved enough to remove the case to federal court, and file an answer, it had already submitted to the personal jurisdiction of the trial court, to justify entry of judgment. That's a very different scenario from what you're describing.
Only to a lawyer. To any normal person, Spamhaus' acceptance of a fact which was completely opposed to objective reality is largely irrelevant. Spamhaus isn't in US jurisdiction, and if it isn't there, then it can't accept it anyway, objective reality trumps opinion.
To take a British example, a police officer cannot stop and search someone unless that search is justified in accordance with various statutory requirements (about reasonable suspicion). There is no system for a (otherwise unlawful) search being lawful because the person being searched consented to it. You have the right to not be searched without various statutory requirements being met, and the objective fact of whether those requirements were met trumps anything that you may have indicated about whether you were willing to be searched.
I'm guessing the reason they didn't is because the UK legal system isn't so easy to shop for an easy win.
You'd think, but when the Metropolitan Police wanted a warrant to search thousands of safe deposit boxes, they went to the geographically appropriate judge, he told them to shove off, so they just went to a different, less geographically appropriate judge and he (not coming across this sort of thing so often) gave them their warrant.
for example maybe the money is better spent on projectors and digital whiteboards for classrooms
Oh, no, never in a million years.
My school had those fitted 2 years before I left - 1 for each department, at £5000 a pop (or so I was told), not including the computer (which didn't arrive for another year). By the time that I actually did leave; one teacher, out of 70, was using theirs regularly. Another teacher or two were using them sporadically, and mostly just for the projector. The only time that I know of that the maths department one was used was when we (i.e. the pupils) used it in a presentation, mostly just so that it would get some use. Even where it was used, it wasn't really being used for anything that couldn't have been done with a white board and some pens.
In conclusion, money could hardly be worse spent than on interractive whiteboards.
I don't think it's unreasonable for a middle or upper class family to incur some cost for their children education.
And I don't think that it's reasonable for anyone who is already paying tax based upon ability to pay, to be put upon to pay for something again, that other people are getting without having to pay again. If current taxation rates won't cover what needs to be spent to give $foo to everyone, then either $foo needs to be reduced, or taxation rates need to be generally increased. Continuing to take money from the upper three-quarter-percentile to pay for stuff for the lower quarter percentile, and then telling the people in the upper group that what their money was providing for the lower group, they have to pay for themselves seperately is patently unfair. A demonstration fo why such means testing is a complete mess can be had by anyone who would like to peer at Blighty during the last 13 years.
Luckily, I spent my time in school learning how to learn for myself. The transition wasn't that terrible. Many other people where I work learned by memorizing where the menu options were and ended up being completely lost in Office 2007.
Education can stop people from being ignorant. It cannot stop them being stupid.
Also, the fact that the damn thing won't let you get at stuff in a way that lets you at least feel like you're in control. In any vaguely DTP-like software I've ever used there's a menu bar option of insert>image>[from file] or similar. In pages? No. The only way to get images in was to drag and drop them, and because the iphoto library is not stored anywhere obvious on the disc, I had to have both iPhoto, and finder around at the same time, depending on where I wanted to get the image from. I also had to keep space of screen for both applications
Then, when I came to try and do some manipulation in the GIMP, not only could I not just install the software, but I couldn't find the files that I wanted because they were on a network drive, which is not exposed in any sort of tidy way to third-party software. The whole thing is a complete mess the moment that you put a foot outside that very carefully polished, very closely controlled and very small area that Apple wants you to see. It's like Portal, infact.
The gentleman in question will be afforded all due process rights when he appears before the court.
He'll be tried immediately, having had ample opportunity to prepare before getting on the plane with his US lawyer provided at the US taxpayer's expense, will he?
He's also had ample opportunity to prove the US has no case at his extradition hearing which your courts upheld as a valid
You clearly haven't been following the story. He has had NO opportunity to prove that the US has no case, because the US doesn't have to prove that it does have a case. It has to do little more than name the person that it wants. That's what the treaty says, so the spineless judges are going along with it.
And much like the other supporters you suggest that the UK break a treaty negotiated in good faith, to prevent cross-border crime
It was negotiated in good faith to help rapidly deal with seriously nefarious types like terrorists, not to deal with people accused of actions which could net them no more than a few months imprisonment in the UK. The US is abusing our good faith, and I don't think there's anything wrong with putting our collective foot down.
As for the rest of your absurd proposal of declaring war on the US' only major ally, I can only assume that you're insane.
Wow, you've managed to get EVERYTHING ass-backwards.
What gets my goat is that a UK citizen damaged US government property
The fact that the allegedly damaged property belonged to the US Government is neither here nor there. The Government is not sacred.
(you have no convincing argument that what he did didn't cost money and time to repair)
On the contrary, no convincing argument has been put forward to support any proferred quantification of alleged damage.
a bunch of British are trying to convince their government that he shouldn't be extradited to the country he caused damage to for trial.
The country that he allegedly caused damage to is right at the top of the list of people who should not be allowed to try him. For the same reason that we don't allow any other victims to decide guilt or sentence
if this Jackass can get no punishment for crimes he committed in the US
The proposal is not so much to block the extradition as to try him in the UK, under UK laws. This would not mean that he would not be punished, but would mean that he would be protected by double jeopardy from any further prosecution, and is a far more watertight solution than simply blocking the extradition.
If this was some American hacker that had breached MI5,6 or Scotland yard and disclosed confidential or private information publicly you would be demanding extradition and long sentencing for the "hacker yank".
Some feeble-minded people might be, I hope that the US would not provide it.
how will he serve probation once he's back in the UK? Or will he be essentially imprisoned on the wrong side of the Atlantic for several years so that he can live like a good little citizen of a country which he doesn't want to be in?
Therefore, the crimes were committed in the US, as they would be if he shot across the border.
Do you have a cite for this? I can't imagine that it comes up very often, but I would assume that the crime would have been committed where the trigger was pulled, (because that's where the action was, rather than the consequence of the action).
First of all, most western countries had the death penalty up until pretty recently (the UK, for example only abolished it in 1969), we're just one of the last ones to still have it.
You got rid of it in 1972, and brought it back in 1976. Even Russia is ahead on this (at least judicially)
consequently were convicted of an offence committed in the UK against a UK bank,
Actually, they had to plead guilty after continuing the case became unsustainable. They were prevented from leaving Houston, and had to try and find some sort of employment to both support themselves, and pay for their defence. After 18 months of that clearly impossible situation, they switched pleas. Of course, the 18 months essentially imprioned in Houston didn't count towards time served, and they're out the money spent on their defence, and 18 months of substnatially reduced earnings because they were just dumped in a foreign land and told to support themselves.
Perhaps the laughably unfair process which persons extradited find themselves in is also a reason for widespread opposition. Using extradition to get your own people back is one thing, using it to send someone else to face a foreign court which will make no allowances for that situation is another.
The case should be ready to go as soon as the person steps off the plane, and legal & accomodation costs should be borne by the government.
Or is the allegation that US prisons are, in and of themselves, cruel and unusual punishment?
Well, the standard that signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights are bound to is "inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". I wouldn't be surprised if, (things continuing to go the way that they are now in Europe, and things staying more-or-less as they are in the US,) the risk of people being imprisoned in a US prison will fall into that category and prevent an extradition sometime within the next 10 years or so. Governments already have to get agreement (from the US) that a person extradited will not face the death penalty in order to fulfill their convention obligations - I would not be at all surprised if 'life-without-parol-in-a-supermax' is next, and not within a great length of time.
Slashdot Mirror
But it is clear that the kid brought about his own downfall.
He hasn't been convicted of anything, and it smells like the Met will be having to get its chequebook out again. Then he will not have brought about his own downfall, but skillfully enacted Operation Just-Enough-Rope.
Even Hitler had more restraint at mass slaughter and oppression than the communists.
Ignoring, for one moment, the fact that I'm aiding and abetting a Godwin here. Hitler didn't kill more people because he didn't have the chance - he'd have gradually killed off the existing populations of most of Eastern Europe and Asia just as soon as he had sufficient Aryans to replace them, given the opportunity.
Stalin got another 10 years after the war to keep bumping people off, and he wasn't fighting a war at the time.
How many middle eastern nations have a military presence in the United States or UK?
Does Mossad count?
No, a police officer cannot search someone without reasonable suspicion, consent is irrelevent. It means that they can't just go up to random people in the street (caveat below) and ask to search them, and their consent make the search lawful. The search has to be independently lawful, and whether someone who wasn't qualified to know if it was lawful gave consent isn't a consideration.
The caveat is Section 44 searches which are supposed to be used for anti-terrorist purposes, which don't require reasonable suspicion, but do require the area that they take place in to be designated by the secretary of state. Now, in practice, London has been designated permanently, on a rolling 28 day (the maximum time) authorization for years.
However, recently it has been discovered that quite a few of the other authorizations given elsewhere in the country were illegal (for instance, because someone messed up the dates and a 29 day authorization was issued). In one case around 800 searches were made under just one of those orders. Those searches will have been illegal; there is no leeway to argue that because the people searched peacefully allowed themselves to be searched at the time, they gave their consent and so no actual legal authority to make the search was necessaary.
Yeah, ok, it's not a perfect example. Sue me.
The whole thing has been smothered in spin and misinformation. Most of this was admissible in court, and the prosecution consisted mostly of the prosecutor using a character assasination of the defendants of his own concoction (not even getting a witness to put their ass on the line to give the character assasination as actual evidence).
In the mean time, the only 'evidence' presented was a knife which was said to have DNA on it from both Knox and the victim (but in such a small quantity that the entire sample was destroyed by the first test, so it couldn't be verified) which came from the house which they both shared. i.e. not really evidence of anything at all.
Truth be told, I don't know if they did it or not, but what I do know is that, of the information which filtered back through the media as far as me, there just wasn't sufficient evidence to convict anyone of anything. I suspect that the next place that they will be going after their mandatory appeals (if they don't get released quietly then) is Strasbourg to give the Italian government a solid kicking.
I also suspect that the only reason they were found guilty was the judges and jury not wanting to disappoint everybody by leaving this high-profile case unconcluded. We saw the same thing in the UK with the Barry George case; flimsy evidence, far-fetched story, media been linking his name to the case for a year or more, inevitable conviction which turns out to be junk.
Shipman, Huntley, Wright, Whiting, George; With a high-profile case and a year or more of the media regularly linking the name of the main suspect with the case, they rarely fail to get a conviction. The media can make sure to say 'suspect' every time, but if you tell me that it doesn't influence the jury ("they've know it was this guy for a year, why would they be prosecuting him if he didn't do it?") I won't believe you.
I don't believe that any jury can be entirely free of the tendency to want such a sensational story to be true and therefore to 'make' it true.
There is, presumably, someone in the food chain who is elected, either the peson who appoints the prosecutor,
or the person who appoints the person who appoints the prosecutor,
or the person who appoints the person who appoints the person who appoints the prosecutor,
or... well, you get the picture.
In any case, the Italian judicial system is a complete joke. We should never have let them have their own country.
jurors, maybe? prosecutors don't convict anyone.
It's prosecutors who stand up and tell the hapless jury "I'm certain that this man is guilty. Here's the evidence which proves that he is."
maybe they wanted to return fire; try and get the case re-opened, show e360's filings to have been utterly false*, and press for e360 to be smacked upside its head. Now that the appeals court has refused to re-open the case, they'll probably just disappear again.
*if they were
Meaning You and I will have to pay $0.027
Very literally, our two cents*.
*yeah, yeah, I know it rounds up to 3.
Once Spamhaus was involved enough to remove the case to federal court, and file an answer, it had already submitted to the personal jurisdiction of the trial court, to justify entry of judgment. That's a very different scenario from what you're describing.
Only to a lawyer. To any normal person, Spamhaus' acceptance of a fact which was completely opposed to objective reality is largely irrelevant. Spamhaus isn't in US jurisdiction, and if it isn't there, then it can't accept it anyway, objective reality trumps opinion.
To take a British example, a police officer cannot stop and search someone unless that search is justified in accordance with various statutory requirements (about reasonable suspicion). There is no system for a (otherwise unlawful) search being lawful because the person being searched consented to it. You have the right to not be searched without various statutory requirements being met, and the objective fact of whether those requirements were met trumps anything that you may have indicated about whether you were willing to be searched.
I'm guessing the reason they didn't is because the UK legal system isn't so easy to shop for an easy win.
You'd think, but when the Metropolitan Police wanted a warrant to search thousands of safe deposit boxes, they went to the geographically appropriate judge, he told them to shove off, so they just went to a different, less geographically appropriate judge and he (not coming across this sort of thing so often) gave them their warrant.
How can you blame something which, essentialy, doesn't exist?
for example maybe the money is better spent on projectors and digital whiteboards for classrooms
Oh, no, never in a million years.
My school had those fitted 2 years before I left - 1 for each department, at £5000 a pop (or so I was told), not including the computer (which didn't arrive for another year). By the time that I actually did leave; one teacher, out of 70, was using theirs regularly. Another teacher or two were using them sporadically, and mostly just for the projector. The only time that I know of that the maths department one was used was when we (i.e. the pupils) used it in a presentation, mostly just so that it would get some use.
Even where it was used, it wasn't really being used for anything that couldn't have been done with a white board and some pens.
In conclusion, money could hardly be worse spent than on interractive whiteboards.
I don't think it's unreasonable for a middle or upper class family to incur some cost for their children education.
And I don't think that it's reasonable for anyone who is already paying tax based upon ability to pay, to be put upon to pay for something again, that other people are getting without having to pay again. If current taxation rates won't cover what needs to be spent to give $foo to everyone, then either $foo needs to be reduced, or taxation rates need to be generally increased. Continuing to take money from the upper three-quarter-percentile to pay for stuff for the lower quarter percentile, and then telling the people in the upper group that what their money was providing for the lower group, they have to pay for themselves seperately is patently unfair. A demonstration fo why such means testing is a complete mess can be had by anyone who would like to peer at Blighty during the last 13 years.
Luckily, I spent my time in school learning how to learn for myself. The transition wasn't that terrible. Many other people where I work learned by memorizing where the menu options were and ended up being completely lost in Office 2007.
Education can stop people from being ignorant. It cannot stop them being stupid.
Also, the fact that the damn thing won't let you get at stuff in a way that lets you at least feel like you're in control. In any vaguely DTP-like software I've ever used there's a menu bar option of insert>image>[from file] or similar. In pages? No. The only way to get images in was to drag and drop them, and because the iphoto library is not stored anywhere obvious on the disc, I had to have both iPhoto, and finder around at the same time, depending on where I wanted to get the image from. I also had to keep space of screen for both applications
Then, when I came to try and do some manipulation in the GIMP, not only could I not just install the software, but I couldn't find the files that I wanted because they were on a network drive, which is not exposed in any sort of tidy way to third-party software.
The whole thing is a complete mess the moment that you put a foot outside that very carefully polished, very closely controlled and very small area that Apple wants you to see. It's like Portal, infact.
The gentleman in question will be afforded all due process rights when he appears before the court.
He'll be tried immediately, having had ample opportunity to prepare before getting on the plane with his US lawyer provided at the US taxpayer's expense, will he?
He's also had ample opportunity to prove the US has no case at his extradition hearing which your courts upheld as a valid
You clearly haven't been following the story. He has had NO opportunity to prove that the US has no case, because the US doesn't have to prove that it does have a case. It has to do little more than name the person that it wants. That's what the treaty says, so the spineless judges are going along with it.
And much like the other supporters you suggest that the UK break a treaty negotiated in good faith, to prevent cross-border crime
It was negotiated in good faith to help rapidly deal with seriously nefarious types like terrorists, not to deal with people accused of actions which could net them no more than a few months imprisonment in the UK. The US is abusing our good faith, and I don't think there's anything wrong with putting our collective foot down.
As for the rest of your absurd proposal of declaring war on the US' only major ally, I can only assume that you're insane.
Wow, you've managed to get EVERYTHING ass-backwards.
What gets my goat is that a UK citizen damaged US government property
The fact that the allegedly damaged property belonged to the US Government is neither here nor there. The Government is not sacred.
(you have no convincing argument that what he did didn't cost money and time to repair)
On the contrary, no convincing argument has been put forward to support any proferred quantification of alleged damage.
a bunch of British are trying to convince their government that he shouldn't be extradited to the country he caused damage to for trial.
The country that he allegedly caused damage to is right at the top of the list of people who should not be allowed to try him. For the same reason that we don't allow any other victims to decide guilt or sentence
if this Jackass can get no punishment for crimes he committed in the US
The proposal is not so much to block the extradition as to try him in the UK, under UK laws. This would not mean that he would not be punished, but would mean that he would be protected by double jeopardy from any further prosecution, and is a far more watertight solution than simply blocking the extradition.
If this was some American hacker that had breached MI5,6 or Scotland yard and disclosed confidential or private information publicly you would be demanding extradition and long sentencing for the "hacker yank".
Some feeble-minded people might be, I hope that the US would not provide it.
how will he serve probation once he's back in the UK? Or will he be essentially imprisoned on the wrong side of the Atlantic for several years so that he can live like a good little citizen of a country which he doesn't want to be in?
Therefore, the crimes were committed in the US, as they would be if he shot across the border.
Do you have a cite for this? I can't imagine that it comes up very often, but I would assume that the crime would have been committed where the trigger was pulled, (because that's where the action was, rather than the consequence of the action).
First of all, most western countries had the death penalty up until pretty recently (the UK, for example only abolished it in 1969), we're just one of the last ones to still have it.
You got rid of it in 1972, and brought it back in 1976. Even Russia is ahead on this (at least judicially)
consequently were convicted of an offence committed in the UK against a UK bank,
Actually, they had to plead guilty after continuing the case became unsustainable. They were prevented from leaving Houston, and had to try and find some sort of employment to both support themselves, and pay for their defence. After 18 months of that clearly impossible situation, they switched pleas. Of course, the 18 months essentially imprioned in Houston didn't count towards time served, and they're out the money spent on their defence, and 18 months of substnatially reduced earnings because they were just dumped in a foreign land and told to support themselves.
Perhaps the laughably unfair process which persons extradited find themselves in is also a reason for widespread opposition. Using extradition to get your own people back is one thing, using it to send someone else to face a foreign court which will make no allowances for that situation is another.
The case should be ready to go as soon as the person steps off the plane, and legal & accomodation costs should be borne by the government.
Right now, he has committed a crime and the US government wants him extradited so that he can be tried and a punishment determined
Right, then the US government will be happy to provide an assurance that
Or is the allegation that US prisons are, in and of themselves, cruel and unusual punishment?
Well, the standard that signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights are bound to is "inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".
I wouldn't be surprised if, (things continuing to go the way that they are now in Europe, and things staying more-or-less as they are in the US,) the risk of people being imprisoned in a US prison will fall into that category and prevent an extradition sometime within the next 10 years or so. Governments already have to get agreement (from the US) that a person extradited will not face the death penalty in order to fulfill their convention obligations - I would not be at all surprised if 'life-without-parol-in-a-supermax' is next, and not within a great length of time.
yes, yes I was. I was tired.