MarkW

You can't reinstate capital punishment "only in cases where @Bender is happy they're a wrong 'un" - it can only be administered after due process, and that due process is frequently susceptible to catastrophic error. Would you have been happy that Sally Clark was guilty after hearing the expert testimony of a renowned paediatrician that she had murdered her children? The jury in the original trial were, as were the judges in the Court of Appeal, and had it occurred in the 1950s she would have been hanged. But she was completely innocent. Or would things have been different if you had been on the jury, with your infallible nose for a genuine wrong 'un? Sally Clark wasn't some petty criminal whose comeuppance was long overdue - she was a hardworking solicitor from a good family who had the great misfortune to lose two of her babies, to be arrested for murder, to have an arrogant fool testify against her as an expert witness, and to have the prosecution withhold vital evidence of her innocence. This wasn't in some kangaroo court in the third world - it was Chester Crown Court in 1999. That could just as easily have been your family, or mine. If it had been your wife, and we had capital punishment, what would you say to her? "Look love, I know it's a bit rough you having to step off when we both know you're innocent, but look on the bright side - we get to kill loads of genuine criminals..." Or is it only unimportant if it's someone else's loved one dangling on the end of the rope?

Then you are left with having to acknowledge that the risk of executing an innocent person every now and then is an acceptable price to pay for a more convenient way of dealing with the hard nuts. You can't have it both ways.

You may, Sir. Capital punishment is not the same as killing in the defence of yourself or others who are at risk of imminent harm. I have no problem with firearms officers shooting terrorists dead on the street, no problem with bike thieves being taken out where they pose an imminent risk to others, and no problem with homeowners killing intruders where there is a legitimate reason for doing so: blowing a pikey in half with a 12-bore as he’s running away like Tony Martin did was undoubtedly bloody satisfying, but it was in no way legitimate self-defence. You can’t have members of the general public executing each other just because they’re pissed off. But once you have arrested someone and got them in the dock they no longer pose a risk of imminent harm, and there is no longer any requirement that they be killed for public safety – there are other options available. All that being said, I’m no fan of our legal system – it’s an absolute joke. The police force is currently tying itself in knots over whether or not it is institutionally racist, whilst missing the rather more pertinent point that it is institutionally incompetent: you stand a better chance of getting a visit from them if you’re accused of hate crime for accidentally ‘mis-gendering’ someone than you ever would if you reported a real crime. The CPS is as good as useless, and the judiciary is hopelessly out of touch. The whole approach to sentencing in this country leaves me dumbfounded – the idea that you can impose an appropriate term of imprisonment for the crime but then let them off half of it if they don’t f*ck about too much is totally arse-about-tit to my way of thinking. They should get time added on if they don’t behave, not taken off if they do. As the old saying goes, justice not only needs to be done but needs to be seen to be done, and I’m sure the apparent feebleness of our legal system is at least partly what drives this enthusiasm among some sections of the public for killing convicts when there is no need to. I have every sympathy for the widow of Andrew Harper – dragged to his death by a bunch of gormless moon-faced pikeys who have been brought up to believe they can do what the hell they like and get away with it – and the sentences they received are an absolute insult to morality. But the idea of mandatory life sentences for killing emergency service workers is just another example of the woolly thinking that public dissatisfaction with the legal system leads to: are we saying that some lives are worth more than others merely by dint of profession? “Had it been a policeman you killed I would have no choice but to commit you to life imprisonment. Luckily for you it was only a primary school teacher, so you will go down for 12 years.” We need proper law and order and we need criminals to receive appropriate sentences, but we also need to retain the ability to make things right when the inevitable mistakes are made. The case @Bender sat through where someone was clearly guilty and admitted it may well be a clear-cut case, but in order for executing him to be an option capital punishment would have to be on the statute books. Quite apart from what it says about a society that allows its government to execute its citizens, the second that happens it is susceptible to exactly the same mistakes and miscarriages of justice as every other punishment. People who advocate for it clearly have far more confidence in our judiciary than I do.

Oh I remember that! I shot slide film (usually Velvia) almost exclusively for years back in the days when you didn't need to remortgage your house to pay for it, and every time I handed a film in to Jessops for processing they gave me a roll of their print film in return. I gave most of them to my wife or our neighbours, but a couple of years ago I found around 50 rolls in the back of a cupboard that were years out of date. I know a lady who is into the whole lomography thing so I gave them to her. These days almost all my colour stuff is digital due to the insane cost of processing, although I do tend to keep one of my 645 backs loaded with Ektar - just in case inspiration strikes...

As @Bender said, you'll need to consider voltage drop - over the full length of the cable 'as it runs' from the consumer unit to the final garage socket, not just from the point you spur off an existing circuit. I'd also consider the existing load on the circuit you'll be spurring off - especially if it's a kitchen circuit anything like ours which has a shit-load of stuff on it already - although I guess a small oven won't be a problem. If you just spur off an existing circuit you'll be relying on the RCD at the head end, with no discrimination between faults in the house and faults in the garage, which again might not be great depending on what else is on the circuit. Then you'll have to piss about pulling the cable through 50 feet of trunking (and applying the appropriate derating factor, naturally ) just for a 13 amp socket. The better option might be to run an SWA from a spare way in the consumer unit and then you can have as much power in the garage as you want - lights, sockets, heaters - whatever. As a new circuit it'd be notifiable, which is the perfect excuse not to have to piss about doing it yourself but sit back with a G&T and let someone else do the hard work.

Neither was I.

No, they really aren't, and there's a substantial body of evidence to support that fact. The effect of gruesome cases on jury decision making and information processing has been fairly extensively studied by psychologists, and there is most definitely an effect on both. It's a significant area of research (or at least it was years ago when my mother was involved with it) precisely because emotion-led decision-making is the last thing you want in a trial. The line between justice and retribution is easily blurred.

That's the thing: it's only a punishment while they are still alive and know it's coming - assuming they even care. Mate of mine is a crime correspondent for a tabloid, and spent time with Ian Brady, who desperately wanted to be allowed to die: the real punishment was keeping him alive.

How does he cope with a face full of incapacitant spray and a good twatting with a baton? As an aside, we bought our house off a prison officer that I knew from the local karate club. The first time went round to view it he was absolutely knackered after a three-day riot at the prison. When I asked him what had started it he said "One bloke on the wing went up to another bloke and said 'Your mum shops in Lidl'".

Sounds like most of the people on here.

I know what you're saying, but the state-sanctioned killing of Lee Rigby's murderers raises a different danger altogether. On top of which, rotting in obscurity is far more of a punishment for a pair who wanted martyrdom.

This is the bit the pro-death penalty mob always go quiet on: the fact that capital punishment only comes at the end of a judicial process that is every bit as susceptible to errors and miscarriages as any other, and that the price you pay for a bit of caveman retribution is that sooner or later you inevitabaly end up punishing the innocent. It's the exact inverse of Blackstone's Formulation: as long as no guilty man escapes the noose then to hell with the occasional innocent victim.

What type of people?

Your old local landlord Albert Pierrepoint came to an entirely different conclusion after a career spent offing people on the gallows - that it served no deterrent purpose whatever.

Yup, none of that stuff is pleasant to look at (I've done a fair bit of forensic entomology in my time) but with much respect you've slightly missed the point - or more likely I didn't make it very well in the first place. You and @Six30 both seem to be advocating for a two-tier system in which capital punishment is reserved for the worst offenders. Most people would consider that a mother who murders her babies would fall into that category, which takes you straight back to the case of Sally Clark and the other women who were wrongly accused of infanticide, and who would doubtless have gone to the gallows had the option been available. And whilst there may be cases - such as the one you describe - where someone 'deserved' the death penalty, the second you have it back on the statute books you're right back to square one when it comes to the risk of wrongly administering the ultimate punishment to the innocent.

But this is precisely the problem, isn't it? People are generally totally convinced of someone's guilt before they sentence them to life imprisonment - that's one of the things that makes no sense when that rebarbative protozoan Priti Patel says we would require 'the highest levels of proof' before sentencing someone to death. Is she suggesting we don't currently require the highest levels of proof before committing someone to spend the rest of their life behind bars? In the case of Sally Clark, who was convicted of murdering two of her three babies, the jury heard the 'expert' testimony of paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow, who confidently explained the vanishingly small "1 in 73 million" statistical probability of both infants dying of natural causes. The jury were totally convinced of her guilt, and sent her down for life. The case went to the Court of Appeal a year later, where the judges were similarly convinced of her guilt, and upheld her conviction. Had you not already done so, this is presumably the point at which you would have gleefully 'pulled the lever'. But Sir Roy Meadow's figures were utter garbage - a result of almost complete statistical illiteracy and gross arrogance. A Home Office pathologist was also found to have withheld the results of microbiology tests that showed the second child had indeed died of natural causes. A review of the medical evidence was commissioned from a leading US forensic pathologist ahead of a second appeal, who said: "Throughout my review, I was horrified by the shoddy fashion in which these cases were evaluated. It was clear that sound medical principles were abandoned in favour of over-simplification, over-interpretation, exclusion of relevant data and, in several instances, the imagining of non-existent findings." There is absolutely no point in saying that capital punishment should be conditional on some 'special' level of proof. We know mistakes will be made in our judicial system because mistakes have been made and continue to be made. Some form of restitution can at least be made for years wrongly spent in prison, but once you've pulled that lever there's no putting things right later. If you support capital punishment you are saying that that doesn't matter: that a few innocent people going to the gallows is an acceptable price to pay for the animal satisfaction of being allowed to string up the genuinely guilty ones. In the end Sally Clark's conviction was quashed, and she was released after having wrongly served more then three years of her life sentence. She died from alcohol poisoning not long after her release, the ordeal of losing two children, being wrongly convicted of their murder and vilified by the press and the moronic masses who were baying for her to be strung up ultimately proving too much to bear. It sickens me - genuinely sickens me - that in this country in the 21st Century there are people who could even entertain the idea of reinstating capital punishment, and that otherwise decent people would be volunteering to do it. In general, humans are a deeply stupid and aggressive species, and we stand no chance of progressing as a society if we pander to our basest instincts.

And presumably would also have pulled the lever on Angela Cannings for murdering her two babies, or Suzanne Holdsworth for battering her neighbours two-year old son to death, or Sally Clark for killing her two babies, or Donna Anthony... All these women would be dead now had someone 'pulled the lever' out of some primitive sense of retribution or 'doing justice'. All of them had their life sentences overturned - more than one of them as a result of the 'expert' testimony of the paediatrician who gave evidence against them being exposed for the utter garbage that it was. He was struck off by the GMC. Perhaps there are some people who think that the State occasionally executing innocent people is a reasonable price to pay for the chance to execute the genuinely guilty, but I'm not one of them.

Well yes and no. It's easy for an unscrupulous researcher to frame a question in a way that gets them the answer they want, or to skew their data by canvassing a cohort that is not representative of the population, but it is equally easy for anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the scientific method to discredit their findings. Consequently, reputable social research consultancies tend to do things properly. Mind you, where data are collected by researchers standing in town centres I always feel that the results will be skewed towards a section of society that didn't even have the savvy to avoid someone who was coming towards them with a clipboard... There are also inherent inaccuracies in one-off surveys, or in data collected over a short period of time - both of which are by necessity the case with Brexit and Covid - but our confidence in a statistic is increased with repetition, and with the application of 'goodness of fit' and inferential tests that determine whether a particular result fits a data series or is an outlier. The British Social Attitudes survey has been collecting data on public support for capital punishment for 37 years, and is conducted by the UK's largest independent social research consultancy. Their data show a steady decline in support from around 75% in 1983 to around 48% today, and we can probably have as much confidence that their data are accurate as we can in any survey. The statistics on public confidence in the judiciary came from the Ministry of Justice, so if they are openly publicising the fact that over 60% of the population has no confidence in them it's probably fairly safe to assume that the real situation is at least that bad.

A couple of years ago, public support for capital punishment in the UK was around 49%. At the same time, only around 36% of the population reported having any degree of confidence in the judiciary. Even if we take the most conservative view possible and assume that all of the 64% with no confidence in the judiciary were opposed to capital punishment, that still leaves 13% of the population who have no confidence in the courts but would still like to see them hand out death sentences. Infer from that what you will about the intelligence of the British electorate.

I'll probably just toss the roll to be honest and chalk it up to an addled brain. I only remember doing something similar once before when I shot a roll of b&w thinking it was colour. That roll actually ended up producing one of my favourite images, but the print I made from it is long gone and I don't fancy trying to find the negative now - it was over 30 years ago!

That just shows lack of effort: here are two far more worthy candidates:

I was going to respond to this very interesting question, but in light of current evidence I am too much of a knob for anything I say about photography to be worth a damn. I took the kids to Yorkshire Sculpture Park today to try out the cameras they got for Christmas, and grabbed my trusty old Nikon FM2 as I headed out of the front door. I keep it permanently loaded with Tri-X in case I ever get the call from McCullin asking me to cover the latest military conflict because he's too busy photographing bowls of fruit and dead pheasants, or whatever it is he gets up to these days. Anyway, pausing only to check that the green filter was screwed on and that I had enough ammo for a full day's action I chucked it in my bag and headed off. There were only four or five shots taken on the film that was already in the camera, and I got some cracking shots on the last 30 or so frames. I wound it back, opened the door and out popped a roll of Velvia. God alone knows what that was doing in there, but they'll look lovely, won't they - shot at 400 with a green filter. £18 a roll, too...

The sure-fire way to win TOTY in 2021 must be to make the current MOTY flounce. Or even out-twat the current TOTY by making him flounce. Or make both flounce - the possibilities are endless!

I've got to seriously up my game - I couldn't even rustle up a nomination this year! For my 2021 bid I'm going to have @XTreme as my campaign manager to help identify any opportunities for twatishly excoriating any especially delinquent members (and he'll have his hands full with that, I imagine) and @Six30 as my press secretary to help bring my message of orthographical intolerance and general hatred of humanity to the masses. It can't fail!