21 April 2013
Justice again! This is just making my mind spin.
Ronald Clark has been jailed for 12 months for possessing anime porn.
For those not in the know, anime is a real Japanese art form - think Pokemon and you'll start getting the idea. Some of it produced features very young-looking girls, but these are line drawings, so picking the age of people drawn is a little difficult, because I'm assuming a 30 year-old dwarf would look little different from a 4 year-old dwarf.
In the case of Ronald Clark, note that he has prosecuted for having pictures of "young-looking" fairies and pixies.
How in the name of reasonable doubt can a judge tell how old a mythical figure is? That is patently absurd and an abuse of the court.
Ronald Clark is a nasty piece of work who deserves no sympathy, having already been convicted of molesting boys, but as a society we cannot go making up evidence, no matter how despicable the defendant.
The bar for abuse must be set a lot higher than this. I am reminded of the persecution of the one-hit-wonder in the 1970s, Joe Dolce, who recently spent time under investigation for child pornography, despite posting pictures that were available at public libraries in Australia.
We had the Salem trials a few hundred years ago, let's not go back there.
19 April 2013
More Kiwi justice.
Yet again I see the absurd double standard in this country.
Kyle Sterten: 9.5 years jail for picking up a 15 month-old baby and smashing its head into the floor hard enough to break his skull, killing him.
Trent Hapuku: 9 years jail for hitting a 5 month-old baby so hard he split the baby's liver, killing him. The baby dared to cry while he was playing on his Playstation.
Kefu Ikamanu: a whole 6.75 years jail for throwing his two year-old daughter at a wall so hard she had similar damage to major car crash victims, who was then kept alive in a vegetative state for eight months before dying. She didn't smile at him.
Simon Kayrouz: 16 years jail for manufacturing crystal methamphetamine, or "P".
As you can see, Kayrouz didn't even profit from it. So, for making something people want to buy - and can buy elsewhere, given the war on drugs is an abject failure - he is serving two-thirds to more than double the penalty of someone who deliberately inflicted fatal injuries on a baby.
Huey P would be proud.
Copyright © Alan Charman