Inside the Coalition of the Willing

[arisbe]

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.

Comments

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

That's horrible. I did smirk about the staying on hunger strike longer bit, I'll admit.

Dan was through a horrible court ordeal, and he wasn't even jailed 24 hours, and eventually charges were dropped and it STILL had horrible terrible repercussions through our lives. I cannot begin to imagine what would have happened for something like THAT.

How anyone can defend that practice as morally right is beyond me. That is just outrageous.

[weret-hekau.livejournal.com]

Oh, that makes perfect sense. Punish the innocent more. If we're going to screw up their lives, why do it half-assed? Take it all the way and continue to add injury to injury. Do you ever feel as if we may have awakened on the other side of the looking glass?

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

£3000 would cover but a small fraction of the cost of maintaining one prisoner for one year. Therefore the sole purpose of this is symbolic. And the symbolism of this is sickening and detestable.

People are routinely assaulted, raped, and killed in prison, whether they are innocent or guilty of the charge for which they were incarcerated. The guards condone or even assist in creating this atmosphere of fear.

The mean-spiritedness of this is shocking.

[kirwar4face.livejournal.com]

But wait! I suddenly see the light at the bottom of the prosecutors' fundamental apertures! If the former prisoners will refuse to pay, they will be guilty of resisting the government. Let them then, to pay their debt to society, be assigned the time already served- in which case it will not have been wrongfully served, and they owe nothing! They may even get a few bucks back on that deal. All that remains is to de-pants Blunkett and his cohorts and fasten them upside down to stocks in the public square, to be pelted with garbage and well-placed kicks by an outraged constituency until they beg for mercy, or get a clue, whichever comes first.

[arisbe.livejournal.com]

A fine solution!