UK riots : in courtrooms across country, there was little room for leniency | UK news

/uk-riots-courtrooms-country

  • Étudiant, pas d’antécédents: six mois fermes pour avoir volé pour 3,5 livres de bouteilles d’eau.

    #UKriots: in courtrooms across country, there was little room for leniency | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-courtrooms-country?CMP=twt_gu

    At Camberwell Green magistrates, Nicholas Robinson, 23, an electrical engineering student with no previous convictions, was jailed for the maximum permitted six months after pleading guilty to stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from Lidl in Brixton. He had been walking back from his girlfriend’s house in the early hours of Monday morning when he saw the store being looted, his lawyer said, and had taken the opportunity to go in and help himself to a case of water because he was thirsty. He was caught up in the moment, and was ashamed of his actions, his defence said.

    La justice n’a pas toujours la main aussi lourde:
    Deaths in police custody since 1998 : 333 ; officers convicted : none | The Guardian
    http://seenthis.net/messages/30475

    A total of 333 people have died in or following police custody over the past 11 years, but no officer has ever been successfully prosecuted, according to a watchdog’s report.

    Ou encore:

    The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom – Telegraph Blogs
    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom

    A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

    Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

    Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.