{"id":53,"date":"2006-03-01T09:16:27","date_gmt":"2006-03-01T09:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/53"},"modified":"2014-04-11T22:38:45","modified_gmt":"2014-04-11T21:38:45","slug":"a-question-of-guilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/53","title":{"rendered":"A question of guilt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The publication today of a new bill &#8220;Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups&#8221; sets me thinking again about the perilous state of justice in this country. I am not fully conversant with all the rules but am clear on what principles ought to apply. These are<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>No punishment without a conviction,<\/strong> and this includes being placed on a register. Being &#8220;known to the police&#8221; is not a conviction. (Education Secretary, Ruth) &#8220;Kelly announced that in future, cautions for more minor sex offences would be treated in the same way as convictions&mdash;both would lead to a ban on working with children.&#8221; This is not justice.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Punishment in proportion to the crime,<\/strong> which does not include being put on a list for life after a minor misdemeanour. Now a parent may say that they wouldn&#8217;t want a pervert teaching their child. But if that conviction was for Indecent Exposure, and when you look at it closely, is actually for urinating in a public place whilst a drunk student, then is a lifelong of vilification on a Sex Offenders Register proportional punishment?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Even in more serious cases, the law generally allows for repentance; it is a requirement for Christian Society. I&#8217;m sure that there used to be a system that all relatively minor sentences (I think the figure was less than a five year prison tariff) would be wiped from the slate after a period of time. This needs to be applied across the board for, what hope does an offender have if there is no prospect for them to start again.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Barred individuals will have a right of appeal.&#8221; but that is too late, the damage has been done by then.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I see from the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/uk_news\/education\/4758978.stm\">news report<\/a>, that &#8220;Parents for the first time will be able to check online the barred status when they&#8217;re employing a nanny or a music teacher&#8221; according to Children&#8217;s Minister, Beverley Hughes. This again raises loads of questions about identity, security and accuracy. The new guy upstairs is advertising piano lessons, let&#8217;s check to see if he is going to molest our kids, what was his name again?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The publication today of a new bill &#8220;Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups&#8221; sets me thinking again about the perilous state of justice in this country. I am not fully conversant with all the rules but am clear on what principles ought to apply. These are No punishment without a conviction, and this includes being placed on a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1821,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/1821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}