Tuesday, 27 October 2009
The Rape Debate
The specific offence of rape only serves to keep on the streets people who should certainly be taken out of circulation. Instead, we need to replace the offences of rape, serious sexual assault and indecent assault with an aggravating circumstance to the ordinary categories of assault, enabling the maximum, and therefore also the minimum, sentences to be doubled, since every offence should carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or 15 years for life. That way, those poor women with broken bones and worse, whose assailants were never convicted of anything, really would have received justice.
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Is it really the cases involving broken bones or worse that we're failing to get convictions on? Everything I've read suggests its the cases with inconclusive physical evidence that the police and CPS are reluctant to bring to trial.
ReplyDelete"Is it really the cases involving broken bones or worse that we're failing to get convictions on?"
ReplyDeleteAccording to the crisis centres and so on, yes. Why not charge them with GBH? Why not, indeed? This way, they'd have to.
If you are given 15 years you should serve 15 years. This 50% reduction for good behaviour is not a good way to punish offenders. The culture of working out likely sentences is "I'll divide what I get by two and that is how long I will be put away".
ReplyDeleteFor a serious crime such as rape the sentences should be tough and long.
It is a GBH offence and should definitely carry a long custodial sentence in all cases.
Quite so. And I don't defend the fifty per cent reduction, introduced by the Tories. What I propose is a minimum sentencing provision, which would mean exactly what it said. Not early release. The sentence itself.
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