I don't know. I sat through a friends murder trial once & it was an absolute travesty of justice. 3 young, white, university students were witnessed by 30 people kicking his head in & hitting him over the head with a piece of 4x2 wood out in the street. One of the students even wrote a sworn statement detailing his part in the murder. They were never even charged. Instead a young, italian male, a bit of a hard case & a friend of the victum who was asleep inside the house at the time that it happened was charged. The statement admiting guilt by one of the murderers was not admissible in the trial because the person who made it was not the one charged. As a result of open disparagement & leading questions & an incompetent lawyer assigned to the guy charged all of the witnesses were discredited. In the judge's closing speach, (& indeed throughout the trial) where he is supposed to tell the jury how objective they should be he also told them that he knew they'd do the right thing & get this "thug" (& other leading terms) off the street. To do this is absolutely against the law... yet he got away with it, & apparently does so frequently. My mother, a social worker, has since informed me that he is known as "The hanging judge". The kid was found guilty & sent to prison for life. This was about 15 years ago now. The murderers all graduated from university & presumably are nicely ensconced in well paying jobs. But no one at all could ever accuse the judge of being lenient. I'm afraid that the figure has skipped from my head, but I do remember, when we studied the rate of wrongful convictions for murder I was horrified at the percentage. In more than half of cases the wrong man/woman is the one sent to prison. To me, if there is even the risk of ONE innocent person being slaughtered by the system, wether as a result of incompetence, bigotry, corruption, misleading evidence or any other cause, then the death penalty cannot be justified.
My question is... is the rate of murders really going up, or is it that the rapid increase in population pressure of the last few decades is coinciding with improvements in the rates of detection & effeciency of record keeping? I suspect that you would have trouble convincing someone from the streets of victorian England that our rates of murder PER HEAD OF POPULATION now, is higher than theirs. Recorded murder maybe, but not murder itself.
My opinion:
2. Icreasing population pressure coinciding with improved detection methods.
