I'm sad to say it, but he's serious. A lot of people in Australia said similar things. They said things like: "He did the wrong thing, he should be punished!"
The thing is, no one was denying that he should have been 'punished'. I think the problem is that people get confused with the fact that the punishment is still supposed to fit the crime. I think people just have a kind of fuzzy concept of 'punishment' and just think: "Crime should be punished" without thinking about proportionality.
One might argue that when there's no 'scaling' of punishment it makes the old saying of "I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb" relevant again. I was looking up the origin of the phrase: The origin lies in the brutal history of English law. At one time, a great many crimes automatically attracted the death penalty: you could be hanged, for example, for stealing goods worth more than a shilling. Sheep stealing was among these capital crimes. So if you were going to steal a sheep, you might as well take a full-grown one rather than a lamb, because the penalty was going to be the same either way.
*sigh* Sad how we seem to be going backwards.
Thank you for not removing me from your friends list for these rants of mine ... I don't do it to be annoying, I swear :)
The thing is, no one was denying that he should have been 'punished'. I think the problem is that people get confused with the fact that the punishment is still supposed to fit the crime. I think people just have a kind of fuzzy concept of 'punishment' and just think: "Crime should be punished" without thinking about proportionality.
One might argue that when there's no 'scaling' of punishment it makes the old saying of "I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb" relevant again. I was looking up the origin of the phrase:
The origin lies in the brutal history of English law. At one time, a great many crimes automatically attracted the death penalty: you could be hanged, for example, for stealing goods worth more than a shilling. Sheep stealing was among these capital crimes. So if you were going to steal a sheep, you might as well take a full-grown one rather than a lamb, because the penalty was going to be the same either way.
*sigh* Sad how we seem to be going backwards.
Thank you for not removing me from your friends list for these rants of mine ... I don't do it to be annoying, I swear :)
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Will now hop over to reply to the next one. It is hard to even keep up with reading. ;)
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