March 17, 2004

• Whoa. That would give *anyone* a persecution complex. Doesn't the Chinese government make the families of executed prisoners pay for the bullet used to kill them?
• Where's that David Blunkett Policy Generator when you need it?
• At the risk of having monkey poo flung at me from all directions, I have to say that I don't find anything particularly troubling about this case. Don't be misled by the overheated tabloid rhetoric of the Sunday Herald piece. This is not about presenting wrongly convicted prisoners with a bill for their board and lodging. It is simply about the way that compensation awards are calculated. In calculating compensation for personal injury, it is fair to take into account the length of time a person may have spent in hospital, being cared for at public expense. Therefore (so the government is now arguing), in calculating compensation for wrongful imprisonment, it is fair to take into account the length of time a person may have spent in prison, being fed and housed at public expense. It's a debatable argument, but it's certainly not an outrageous one. And since the cost of compensation awards is becoming a major drain on the public purse, I think it is only reasonable for David Blunkett to look for ways of reducing the cost. *shields head in arms, waits for poo-flinging to start*
• Yeah, he's deserves false imprisonment simply for being Irish!
• grrr, he's = he
• verstegan, whats all this about giving advances on the compensation and then charging interest at 23%? and surely the point of compensation is to compensate the person who has had their life stolen, not to stop the Home Office from facing up to the financial cost of imprisoning all and sundry
• "Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating." Nice movie. Still gives me nightmares. But it had no monkeys..
• verstegan, what about the fact that prisoners - wrongly convicted ones, we should stress - are unable to work while incarcerated? How are they to pay these fees when released? I see that one of the prisoners interviewed has yet to see his final payout, but the Home Office is already asking him to pay up. If I were this lad, I'd be declaring bankruptcy. As to the rising cost of compensation payments, I must please ignorance of the UK budget - but is it really a significant line item? And if it is, and this is just a pie in the sky thought here, wouldn't NOT WRONGFULLY CONVICTING THE INNOCENT, be a more appropriate strategy to reduce the cost?
• verstegan: If the government of the United Kingdom is concerned about the costs of false imprisonment, perhaps it could do something about a long history of police an judicial corruption, epsecially where vice, minorities, and terrorism are concerned, instead of further punishing the victims. What next, rapists charging their victims for the condoms? On preview: what vitalorgnz said.
• hey, it's a nice change to see an article where it's some other country besides the usa acting completely insane. ugh. there's no reasonable way you can present this situation... taking any money off the top of the wrongfully imprisoned person's compensation for "room and board" is disgusting. try doing your job right the first time, you twits... for that matter, why not charge the fools who got it wrong, eh...? makes more sense.
• This is simply WRONG. Period. There is no reasonable argument to justify this. Frankly, I'll refuse to listen to anyone TRY to justify it. Best way to look at this is to imagine yourself in the same shoes as Hill. Look at the magnitude of what he has lost that can NEVER be gotten back! The most precious of all; TIME. Blunkett should be deeply ashamed. Bastard!!!
• This is so outrageous I'm going to call bullshit.
• Scottish Executive ministers are to thwart David Blunkett
• As to the rising cost of compensation payments, I must plead ignorance of the UK budget, but is it really a significant line item? Well, here are some figures from an article that appeared in the Guardian almost exactly a year ago: Over the last decade, there have been over 150 successful applications for compensation .. This led the Home Office to pay out a record
• >It is simply about the way that compensation awards are calculated. >In calculating compensation for personal injury, it is fair to take into account the length of time a person may have spent in hospital, being cared for at public expense. >time a person may have spent in prison, being fed and housed at public expense. The thing about prison is you are being supervised. Don't call eating and sleeping in prison a luxury since the food is cheap and the living quarters are bare to none. The bigger expense is being watched 24 hours a day. t r a c y liked your analogy.
• though I agree with him that the system for calculating compensation needs to be made more transparent.1) The potential one would have in life's rewards should negate any bare living expenses.
• Meaning, stuck in prison who knows what one
• That link. SHould learn to use preview, really...
• The real problem (as you rightly point out, thomcatspike) is that there is no obvious way to calculate a "fair" level of compensation. What is "fair"? What price can you put on the suffering of someone who has been imprisoned for seventeen years for a crime he didn't commit? It's incalculable. And then there is the problem of comparing one case with another. If someone has been wrongfully imprisoned for five years, does he deserve five times as much compensation as someone who has only been imprisoned for one year? But it has to be done. Slowly and painfully, the British government is evolving a formula for calculating compensation; and the "board and lodging" deduction is one element in that formula. The much-mocked "sliding scale" (by which you get more compensation for your first year of imprisonment than for subsequent years) is another element. It's not perfect, and it's got a long way to go; but it is at least better than simply plucking a figure out of the air.
• Verstegan, aren't you shifting ground a little? The article is not about the formula for compensation. It is about presenting ex-prisoners with a bill, after (or even before) compensation has been paid. I think the other point that you're missing is that the prisoners were not consuming Her Majesty's resources by choice. They were compelled to stay in prison. It strikes this monkey as unjust to forcefeed someone my bananas, and then charge them for it.
• "Jail foreigners, and then put their children into care. And charge them for it." Chris would seem to be updating the Policy Generator in line with recent events...
• the prisoners were not consuming Her Majesty's resources by choice. They were compelled to stay in prison Exactly. Next thing you know the UK will be charging the Iraqis for the war expenses.
• The article is not about the formula for compensation. It is about presenting ex-prisoners with a bill, after (or even before) compensation has been paid. vitalorgnz, are you sure about that? That's not the way I read the article. I know it says that Robert Brown is "facing a bill of around
• I would have thought that the difference is that the Government does not seek to recover such "Bed & Breakfast" costs from the guilty upon release, although they do seek to factor those costs into compensation payments made to the innocent (or at least, the "wrongly convicted"). Quite right, one might think, as many criminals wouldn't have the resources to pay such a charge upon release. But this, I think, is the nub of the injustice in such a scheme. Governments would, I'm sure, love to charge all criminals for their time in jail if they could, and here they feel they can because they know the released has the resources to pay: because the government has given them those resources for unjustly imprisoning them in the first place. It's the difference in treatment - the "pay up only if you are innocent" effect - that sticks in the craw.
• verstegan, I guess I'm impressed at the way you're sticking to your guns, but I find it very hard to understand how anyone not working for the government could possibly think this is justifiable. These people are innocent. They've been kept in jail. Does that not make an impression on you? Are there not other ways money can be saved?
• To have impressed you, languagehat, is an honour. To have persuaded you would have been beyond my wildest dreams. If you think I am indifferent to the suffering of innocent people, you are very very wrong. When the truth first began to emerge in the 1980s about the wrongful imprisonment of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, and many others, it had a shattering effect on me; very much, I imagine, as the Dreyfus Affair did on people in the 1890s. I was a teenager at the time, and I'll never forget how shocked and revolted I was by the complacency of my elders. I had a furious row with my parents after they assured me that it "didn't matter" if a few innocent people had been imprisoned. It still angers me to think about it. But the present case alarms me for a different reason. It frightens me to see how ready people are to believe the worst of the present Labour Government, often on the flimsiest grounds. For once I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with Polly Toynbee in yesterday's Guardian. "Those who want a Labour Government - even if they want a different/better one - need to start appreciating the one they've got instead of collaborating with the enemy to tear it down." All I am asking for is a sense of proportion. As I said in my initial comment above, the Government's actions in this case strike me as "debatable but not outrageous". I stand by that judgement. If the Government's case gets thrown out by the Appeal Court, I am not going to shed any tears. But it is not the work of evil men, as many people here seem to assume.
• For once I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with Polly Toynbee in yesterday's Guardian. "Those who want a Labour Government - even if they want a different/better one - need to start appreciating the one they've got instead of collaborating with the enemy to tear it down." As someone who does want a Labour government - one who longed for it, never having known anything other than Tory rule until 1997 - I have no desire to collaborate to tear it down. But I'm equally not going to start appreciating things that I oppose, and they're just so common with this government. They don't stop me appreciating the good things - economy, minimum wage, increased spending, certain elements of social policy - but I have such problems with so many of their pronouncements, especially those which come from Blair and Blunkett, that I think something has to be done to balance them out, for the good of the country and the party. In this case, I think dodgy logic ("an independent assessor appointed by the Home Secretary takes into acccount the range of costs the prisoner might have incurred had they not been imprisoned" - if that's the principle they're basing it on, surely compensation if now being defined only as "the savings you would have acccumulated had you not been in prison") is disguising, not an evil intent, to be sure, but simply an utterly uncaring approach towards the people they're supposed to help. And as such, it's pretty much par for the course. As such, the goal of the next election (for me) will be a 'victory' for Gordon Brown - a reduction of the majority to double figures, with the retention of more left-wing MPs and the loss of all those Blairites who were never even supposed to be elected back in 1997. It'll be tricky, but it's acheivable.
• People are ready to believe evil of the British Labour government, verstegan, because of its track record. Even Thatcher (who was responsible for more than a few travesties in the areas of attempts to deny natural justice) did not attempt to repeal double jeopardy. Blunkett's attempts to reshape the legal system so he can prevent judicial review of whole portions of government policy, block jury trials, remove double jeorpardy so he can try people again and again until he gets the result he wants, and now support for this despicable attack on men already grievously sinned agains lead to the impression that he would be most at home in a totalitarian regime. You seem to place your partisan concern for protecting one political party over any concern for whether it behaves in a manner according with any notions of justice or decency do you no credit. What is the point of being outgraged by the injustices perptrated by the Birmingham Six if you will blindly support a government whose members will steer your country down the path to more of the same? A principled minister, a principled cabinet, would have rejected this proposal out of hand as an affront to the priciples of natural justice. This is not a principled minister. This is not a principled cabinet, and this is not a principled government. My most selfish fear in all this is that the idiocies of the most vile members of the present Labour government in Britain (such as Blunkett and Jack Straw) quickly are adopted as policy by New Zealand's own would-be autocrats such as Phil Goff. He is already promoting, using Britain as his justification, the removal of jury trials and double jeorpardy at the whim of the state. No doubt it will be only a little time before this measure is mooted.
• I've been in a name calling mood lately, so there's no reason to stop now. (deep breath) Fascist is obviously an over used word, applied to every and anyone who we disagree with, without justification, but but but I'd say that David Blunkett is someone who is, or is in danger of becoming one. One of the central ideas of fascism always seemed to me to be the idea that the Government controls the courts, which is something that David Blunkett has repeatedly appeared to desire. So I'm reduced to mouthing obscenities his way every now and then: Blunkett=Fascist
• Let's turn the situation on its head for a moment. Consider the (hypothetical) case of a prisoner who is released on parole pending the outcome of an appeal. Let's imagine that his appeal is successful. Would it be fair to compensate him for his living expenses while out on parole? I think you will say "yes". But if it is fair to take living expenses into account in this case, why not in others? (Unless UK and NZ have diverged very greatly, you don't get parole because you have an appeal - only good behaviour is grounds for parole. A parole hearing cannot prejudge the likely success of an appeal. But that's by the by.) Um, no, I wouldn't compensate a prisoner on parole. If you are on parole, you are once more either able to work or draw unemployment, and should therefore be on your own (assuming that you consider being on the dole "on your own"). And I think you'll find that in actual fact, this is what happens. So I can't accept the corollary you propose either. If you are thinking of remand, ie the state where you are in custody before conviction, currently in the UK or NZ you get no compensation if you are subsequently found innocent. That's a whole other pile of monkey poo though!
• It happened Two men wrongly convicted of killing newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater must pay for "board and lodgings" received while in prison. Vincent Hickey, 49, and his cousin Michael, 42, both from Birmingham, spent 18 years in jail for the murder of 13-year-old Carl, from Stourbridge. Michael Hickey had originally been awarded
• So 18 months of bed and board for Michael Hickey are to be valued at 247 500 squid? Over three thousand a week for these palatial digs? More than 450 a day? Seems a little on the high side.
• Don't forget, Wolof. These are en-suite facilities.
• It was 18 years, Wolof, not weeks. They are still charging him
• And its such a fucking disgrace I really don't know what to say about it.
• Funny thing about governments. I believe the government of mainland China charges the family of a death-sentence convict the price of the bullet used to execute him/her.
• THUD. That was the sound of me abandoning all hope.
• We aren't as bad as China, though, flashboy. Therefore, everything is fine
• flash, you seem to have dropped something back here...it looks a bit like some hope. Do you want it back?
• It was 18 years, Wolof, not weeks d'oh!