NationStates Jolt Archive

Well, NSG, it might interest you to know that within New Zealand, as a result of a judgement today, the realm of negligence has been expanded. According to today's judgement, it seems that government departments owe a duty of care to the public to protect them from paroled criminals, and this judgement has opened the door for government departments to be sued should someone be a victim of crime as the result of a paroled criminal doing a criminal act.

Of course, this is all good news to the victims of crime, and particularly Susan Couch, who was nearly left dead nearly seven years ago in a murder spree which saw three others murdered. The murderer, William Bell, was on parole at the time.

So NSG, do you think this new legal precedent is a good thing, or do you think that government departments do not owe a duty of care?

One more thing, here is an article http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10516145

This means trouble for people awaiting parole.

And most of such people aren't terrorists/murderers/whatever, they're your regular Joe who happened to have a severe accident.

Congratulations! You've just eliminated the concept of parole in New Zealand.

Personally I support it. It will get rid of the culture of "Ok, you're on the parole list, granted, Next!" and promote "so, you've killed someone, and shown no remorse during trial... denied"

Unfortunately the issue with parole and risk assessment is that, although we have it pretty damn accurate, with probably around an 80% chance of predicting if someone is likely to seriously re offend or not, it's in no way a perfect system, it can't be. If we could perfectly predict human behaviour we probably wouldn't need a criminal justice system in the first place.

The fact is that, the vast majority of parolees do not go on to violently/sexually reoffend during their parole. This judgement essentially means that the 90-odd% who don't will remain locked up for the rest of their sentence to ensure that the few % who do don't get out. Not only does this cost the state literally millions more in the cost of locking people up, it also means that when they are released at the end of their sentence then they will be back in the community with no supervision at all, no trial period to see if they're ready whilst they're being guided, supervised by a parole officer, no idea of where they are, nothing.

Edit: This does not mean I do not feel there should be appropriate safeguards and parole certainly shouldn't be granted automatically, risk assessments, consideration etc... is necessary. But it can never be 100% and this is not the way to go about it.

Wasn't unexpected