Monday 24 October 2011

I Rather Doubt He Ever Possessed The Ability…

A workman on a building site left a teenage apprentice unconscious and with a broken jaw after a row over a scratched work van.
Nice!

Even the defence can’t find some halfway-decent mitigation for this:
Clare Evans, defending, said of her client: “He maintains that this was an incident that was isolated.
“As they began to argue the toss about whether Mr Hibbins did or did not cause the damage Mr Aldridge rather expected Mr Hibbins to say ‘all right, I did’. He said he rather lost the ability to know what to do.”
Really?
Judge Tom Corrie said he viewed the defendant’s account “with a healthy dose of scepticism” and added: “There was no excuse at all for this grotesque over-reaction.”
Reaching deep down into the Big Book Of Excuses, the defence suddenly remembered some:
Miss Evans said Aldridge, who has a previous criminal record for domestic abuse, had not had much sleep the night before the attack and his partner had recently lost a baby at 38 weeks.
Oh, well, quite understandable. Who could put the poor man behind bars after hearing that?

Certainly not the judge:
Judge Corrie gave him a 12-month jail term, suspended for two years, with 12 months’ supervision, 150 hours’ unpaid work and order to pay £500 costs and £500 compensation.
*sigh*
As Aldridge left the dock, a member of Mr Hibbins’ family told him: “You got off light there, didn’t you? Got off very light.”
Yes. Yes, he did…

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

A great exmple of our weak justice system!

SBC said...

"£500 compensation. "

That's the real kick in the teeth..excuse the pun. Whether or not he should have gone to prison aside, the compensation awarded to victims in this cunt-ry is insulting. The poor victim had his jaw wired shut for a month and will probably never be totally pain free the rest of his life. ₤5000 would have been fairer.

Captain Haddock said...

You can bet there'd be no suspended sentences involved were someone to smack a Judge, on or off-duty ..

Zaphod said...

Aggressive and violent male primates are the inevitable result of countless generations of selective breeding by female primates.

Statistically, I don't see any sign of their selection parameters changing significantly.

Once this is considered, it explains a lot.

It's the Pitbull/Labrador thing.

Julia, if you girls start to choose the wimps to get pregnant by, you'll soon be stronger than us. Problem solved?

Anonymous said...

But Zaphod, youre going against the bilogical imperative..

Females go foer the biggest bastard they can find on the hope he's a bastard to everyone else first....


Sad to say it very rarely works out that way

Zaphod said...

Indeed. And a female who gets pregnant to a bastard who screws around, is likely to have sons who will screw around.

This will increase her crop of grandchildren, (known or unknown), and thus, unwittingly, her share of the future gene pool.

We are predominantly descended from violent promiscuous brutes and tolerant women. Would a visiting alien be able to deduce that by studying our society?

I'm not saying that's good, but it needs to be acknowledged.

The solution? Dunno, but talking pious nonsense gets us nowhere.

My point may be, it's all womens' fault?

"I know he's a bastard, but I love him! He'll change, you'll see."


(Shrug)

Zaphod said...

That's not really my point. Hence the question mark. :-)

JuliaM said...

"Whether or not he should have gone to prison aside, the compensation awarded to victims in this cunt-ry is insulting. "

And even that is likely to go unpaid...

"Problem solved?"

;d