7 posts tagged “crime”

I was pretty appalled to hear that the killer of 78-year-old Jasmatbhai Patel only got three years today.
   Apparently, provocation is not much of a defence for killing someone in this country, but road rage gets you off lightly.
   Bio O’Brien, 28, with prior convictions for violent crime, was driving his BMW and had an accident with Mr Patel’s van. He dragged the elderly man out of his van and attacked him. When Mr Patel fell to the ground, he hit his head and bled profusely, dying of the injury in hospital the next day.
   I don’t care how pissed off you are that someone dented your German car. There’s such a thing as insurance. And if you are going to get annoyed, the worst that I can ever see a “normal” human being do is get loud.
   I can’t see any diminishing of mens rea if you drag someone from a vehicle, then beat him up. You know you are dragging someone from his van. You know when you are hitting someone. You have formed an intent to do that. No amount of road rage gets a reasonable human being that upset.
   I remember reading about manslaughter and murder in law school, and short of going to my Smith & Hogan to check this stuff, this act is on the extreme side of manslaughter at the least.
   Lesson: if you are going to kill someone, get into a car accident with him first. Then your defence lawyer will argue road rage and a murder rap becomes a tiny three-year manslaughter stretch.
   Or, do it in Auckland, where apparently dragging an old man out of his vehicle and beating him up is evidently such a flippant crime it carries less than half the maximum penalty for manslaughter.

I am glad to know that the murder of Adam Walsh has been confirmed as solved in the US.
   John Walsh’s press statements yesterday were carried here on network television, a nod to his global celebrity status.
   Mr Walsh turned his anger over his six-year-old son’s murder into a productive search for suspects across the US—and his efforts are credited for helping solve hundreds of cases.
   While Fox’s motives for showing Walsh’s America’s Most Wanted stem from the tabloid journalism that made it infamous in Australia, the UK and the US, the benefits of the show have outweighed the negatives considerably, in my mind. Selling it on as entertainment might be looked upon less charitably.
   I feel for this man. I do not know what emotions he went through when his son went missing, and then when young Adam’s severed head was found. I hope we never do learn those emotions first-hand. But I think we all understand loss and anger.
   Not all of us are as great as John Walsh in being able to turn that into a force for good.
   I also have to act in an un-Christian way because I find a child murderer’s actions disgusting and it is terribly hard to forgive a bastard nonce, even when it’s not my own kin upon whom such a horrible act has been committed.
   But God bless the Walsh family, for the suffering they have been through and for their positive contributions to crime-fighting.
   I hope many other families find justice.

It surprises me that O. J.: the Untold Story, the BBC documentary about the likely murderer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, has never aired in the US, though it has aired in other nations.
   I am no fan of O. J. Simpson (admittedly he was good in Capricorn One) and there was a lot that emerged in the 1995 trial that showed the guy was a slimeball.
   The latest Las Vegas incident shows a man who has flouted the law so many times for other acts that he has become arrogant and callous.
   However, the documentary convinced me that Jason Simpson was the real killer, as I have said on this blog before.
   Perceptions are very different among different groups of people. The majority of white Americans thought O. J. was guilty. The majority of black Americans thought O. J. was innocent.
   As it has come up a few times during the last few days, here is a link to the BBC preview on its website.
   I paste from that article and I admit to taking a lot more than what is reasonable below, but it’s only out of concern that the BBC won’t keep some of these older pieces online, especially as it bears the old layout. (I’ll remove the below on request and I ask readers to click on the above link for the original.)

Wednesday, 4 October, 2000, 11:46 GMT 12:46 UK
New clues in OJ Simpson murder mystery

By Malcolm Brinkworth, producer of a BBC programme which sheds new light on the case of former American football star OJ Simpson.

… OJ—The Untold Story reveals that clues that some believe pointed away from Simpson as the killer were dismissed or ignored …

Dr Lee: Crime scene was "contaminated"

Dr Henry Lee, one of the world’s most respected forensic scientists, states … that the crime scene was “out of control”, was contaminated and that the police had destroyed so much at the murder scene that it was impossible to reconstruct what happened that night.

Dr Lee also reveals that the police failed to take crucial blood samples from Nicole’s back which might have helped solve the case.

Who did kill Nicole Simpson?

It is their view that the evidence was seriously compromised and would have been rejected by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service.

Potential new suspect

The film also explores new areas, which have not been fully investigated by the authorities. It features private investigator Bill Dear and follows his enquiries into Jason, Simpson’s son from his first marriage …

Jason: History of violence

The programme examines the evidence that shows that six months before her murder, Nicole was put under surveillance.

A man called Bill Wasz, who he says, had supplied cocaine to Simpson, Nicole and friends, had been hired by one of Simpson’s friends to follow her and take photographs of Nicole with any man she might meet.

He recorded his surveillance in a notebook. In an interview from prison, where he is currently serving a jail term for armed robbery, Wasz explained that 10 days after handing over the photographs, he had been asked by Simpson's same friend to a meeting for a new assignment.

At that meeting, Wasz says, Simpson’s friend then hired him as a hitman to kill Nicole.

Police ignored ‘hitman’ claims

The programme reveals that the police were made aware of Wasz’s story just a few weeks after the murders and … the prosecution decided to dismiss it.…

Folks may recall the videos I posted about the possibility that Hillary Clinton committed a breach of electoral finance laws in 2000 a few weeks back.
   The following was Dugg today: ‘Paul v. Clinton: Experts Question Whether Clinton Campaign Finance Case Will Impact ’08 Race’.
   It’s an old article from 2007 but the last time it was on Digg, Democratic supporters dismissed it as a right-wing attack on their Hillary.
   Now you see from the comments on Digg that many, many Democrats have joined in and the right-wing charge has disappeared. It’s obviously accepted by more of the US population.
   The excerpts are interesting (and I am being biased against Sen. Clinton in selecting these):

The star-studded August 2000 event was later deemed to be a violation of federal campaign finance laws: The Clinton campaign had to pay a $35,000 fine to the Federal Elections Committee. Clinton’s campaign finance director David Rosen was accused of lying to the FEC, indicted, but eventually acquitted. …
   The case presents the classic question of what Clinton knew and when she knew it, said election lawyer John Armor. He said the tape shows that Clinton allegedly committed at least four felonies pertaining to illegal campaign fundraising and obstructing subsequent federal investigations into the matter. …
   “No presidential candidate was ever caught on videotape engaged in felony,” Paul told Cybercast News Service. “No candidate [has ever been] engaged in major civil fraud suit [that] she was forced to testify in.” …
   In a written declaration for the California court filed on April 7, 2006, Clinton said only that she did not remember discussions with Paul about the fundraiser.
   “I have no recollection whatsoever of discussing any arrangement with him whereby he would support my campaign for the United States Senate in exchange for anything from me or then-President Clinton,” Clinton wrote.

   The following excerpt, however, is very sad:

From a political perspective, the public stopped caring about alleged misdeeds by either of the Clintons, said Gary Rose, political science professor at Sacred Heart University.
   “When it comes to the Clintons, they are generally immune to public condemnation regarding ethical lapses and violations of the law,” Rose told Cybercast News Service. “If this case continues into the general election, we'll see how it affects swing voters and independents, but it is not going to derail her bid for the nomination. I still remember Bill Clinton’s polls, and two-thirds of voters said they didn’t trust him but voted for him irrespective of his morality or ethics.”
   Even critics of Clinton don’t think the case will harm her politically.
   “She’s going to hold the highest office in the country. She’s got the money, the organization and the FBI files,” James Nesfield, president of the Equal Justice Foundation of America (EJFA), said in an interview.

   I don’t think Americans are that stupid but there is one part that rings true: we are so used to the idea of the Clintons being crooks we don’t bat an eyelid any more. The more news like this surfaces, the more it becomes part of the Clinton noise, and fewer and fewer will care. We become desensitized.
   None of this has made it into the MSM in this country and I bet little has made it into the MSM in the States. 
   Also, the voting public was different in 1996 because they did not see the Sen. Dole as being potentially effective—either have an ineffective, uninspiring president, or an untrustworthy one. Americans chose the latter, since when did politicians and trust go together?
   In 2008, the world is different—Americans have the choice between an experienced candidate (McCain) or the claimed agent of change (Obama). Or, the least experienced of the three in elected office who claims sleep deprivation causes lies (Clinton).

We’ve ended January 2008 here in New Zealand with 10 murders. The government is saying this is an anomaly, but is it?
   Crime has been rising in New Zealand steadily since I have been observing the numbers and for older New Zealanders, the latest figures are a disgust.
   I am not overly surprised, given the rising gap between rich and poor, suggesting a mismanagement of the economy and an absence of jobs, while values and education have suffered at the same time.
   Those older New Zealanders who can remember back to the 1950s remember a country with roughly half the population and 18 convictions for murder between 1951 and 1957.
   I realize actual murders and successful convictions are different, but assuming that there were a couple of murders in this period that didn’t lead to a conviction, then we’re still looking at 20 over a seven-year period from January 1951 to December 1957.
   That’s roughly three per annum. If there’s double the population now, then we should expect statistics to show that there are six per annum for 2008.
   Remember that medical science wasn’t as advanced, so if we adjust for that, then maybe this estimate isn’t actually that far off.
   In this election year, I wouldn’t buy any party line that says things are all right. I wouldn’t even buy policies that talk about tougher sentencing. Because neither of these address the root problem.
   We need policies in New Zealand that say: we will address this rich–poor gap.
   How? Well, how about recognizing what’s going on instead of kowtowing to multinational corporations operating here?
   Since the end of Muldoonism, New Zealand has become the poster boy of the technocracy, doing everything that the economic experts said should work: privatization, free markets, the ending of tariffs.
   Ask yourself, even in the last five years, can you afford more or less of the things you want in your life? I don’t care if you are a student or a wage-earner or even a small business boss. The answer is probably no.
   When will we wake up and realize that these policies have driven a wedge between the rich and poor in a nation that once prided itself on being a fair, just, middle-class country?
   Since Labour sold off so many state assets in the 1980s, something National continued doing in the 1990s, we now have a lot of things in the hands of foreign corporations.
   Now, if these corporations were running these assets more efficiently, logically the government should be able to increase its tax take, which leads to more money for hospitals, schools and social services.
   But the idea of being a private corporation that spreads its activities across different countries is the ability to minimize the tax you pay, by writing some of it off with the operations you have in other places.
   So the opposite has happened. Meanwhile, these corporations have shed staff so the people who used to work there wound up on the dole, and there’s less money to pay out.
   The rich in cahoots with the big companies have done well while everyone else has suffered.
   To make up the shortfall in government coffers, the Labour Government introduced Lotto and basically became the biggest attraction for gamblers. Now we are reporting a rise in calls to gambling helplines.
   The other idea behind liberalizing our markets was so New Zealanders could go and compete globally. But how were we expected to make that leap? Even the richest New Zealanders of the 1980s didn’t survive the decade in good financial shape.
   We need to innovate and create and start new businesses but the support, as any entrepreneur will tell you, is not there.
   Yet New Zealand is a place of great, novel ideas that often stay dormant, unless that Kiwi goes offshore and has a foreign company become interested.
   I have repeated this example many times: if TradeMe was really that successful, it would have bought Fairfax, not the other way around.
   The solution must be to have New Zealanders own New Zealand businesses, so that New Zealanders have jobs and taxes and profits stay in New Zealand.
   This is not about putting the barriers back up. The multinationals have embedded themselves too much into New Zealand.
   We can only hope to create global businesses that do for us what the multinationals have done here. We also need to encourage entrepreneurship at the small- to medium-sized business level so that everyone can have a chance to get his or her idea off the ground, beating the world. We are still blessed with a fairly good internet infrastructure that can become a useful tool for New Zealanders. 
   We need to consider tax policies that help the poor and penalize the sources for the inequity in New Zealand. The next government needs to play, essentially, Robin Hood. It needs to create policies for the middle class of New Zealand and what makes them happy wage-earners or self-employed business people, because that is where the majority of the tax will come from. ‘Teach a man to fish and he will eat for life.’ Time to stop handing the fish out and pretending it was a conjuror’s trick. (It was only cool when Jesus Christ did it with the 5,000, anyway.)
   And while I am a globalist at heart, this economy is too small at this point to allow technocratic policies to have free reign, without someone seeing to the interests of the Kiwis that need the most help. I want to see food banks disappear in five years because everyone has a job.
   An innovative government that might create new businesses itself can be a useful agent in the business community. In the 1970s and 1980s, New Zealand’s dual-fuel natural gas infrastructure is still a dream for most countries. Yet a huge percentage of the nation’s cars ran on natural gas back then, able to fill up at the majority of stations across New Zealand.
   Government participation in a modernized Keynesian model could just work in 2008 and one only needs to look at Singapore and Malaysia for nearby adaptations of the very policies New Zealand had only 30 years ago.
   No one can claim they are paupers, and Malaysia itself did find, in 1997, that the technocratic way of thinking didn’t work for them. Having a strong man as a prime minister worked in its favour as Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad was able to say what he thought of the corporations wreaking havoc on his country’s financial markets.
   And with relatively little corruption in New Zealand, government innovation is not a bad idea, provided these state enterprises do not get overmanned to the levels they were at in years past.
   Remember, Absolut, the people who make the vodka, is a government-owned enterprise. No one seems to urge the Swedish Government to divest for the sake of the technocracy.
   Then, those who might find themselves in similar situations to the 10 murderers won’t suffer from envy, depression or rage.
   In the 1950s, New Zealand had about nine people unemployed. In the 2010s, we should be looking at 18. Full employment is key and the policies we are following now—policies which Labour and National predict they will essentially follow—won’t lead to any change in our rising crime rate or the widening gap between rich and poor, which neither party has even mentioned in the lead-up to the 2008 elections.

In mid-2006, I remember a friend of my colleague Nigel Dunn had shot a guy who tried to rob him, defending himself and a staff member.
   Greg Carvell, the gun shop owner whose life was being threatened by armed thief Ricky Beckham, was still charged by police for firearms’ offences.
   Mr Carvell has had an outpouring of support nationally, and I have to agree. We have bloody good cops here for the most part, but the decision to charge him does seem to go against the ideas of self-defence under the Crimes Act.
   The judge who sentenced Mr Beckham today said there was some ‘unfairness’ to Mr Carvell’s charging, so let’s hope the judiciary, and Mr Carvell’s lawyer, will do what is right. Apparently, the Carvell family’s life has been ‘ruined’ by the prosecution, says Greg’s father.

My only copy of Beyond Branding, the book I co-wrote with my Medinge colleagues, has gone missing. I expected that I may have lent it to staff, but tonight, my curiosity got the better of me: what else is missing?
   The following books are missing from this office, and there’s no way that they all could have been loaned. Some cash has gone missing, too. If anyone has bought them from a single seller in New Zealand, then you may have bought stolen goods. None were available on general retail sale here.
   I have no recourse legally under New Zealand law if you were a bona fide buyer, so I won’t be going after you. But I do want to get to the bottom of this theft and will be reporting it to the police on Monday.

• N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands, 1st ed. London: Kogan Page 2003.
• M. Kelly: The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. San Francisco: Berrett–Koehler 2001.
• R. Mathews and W. Wacker: The Deviant’s Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets. New York: Crown Business Publications 2002.
• M. Lewis: Next: the Future Just Happened. New York: W. W. Norton 2001.
• J. Yan: Typography and Branding. Christchurch: Natcoll Publishing 2005.

By coincidence, the missing books are ones that I do not have signed by their authors, and were in excellent condition. So someone knew what they were taking and had the opportunity to inspect them.
   If anyone wants to donate copies, I will gratefully accept! I normally would pick them up while travelling, and I can’t justify the shipping expense for replacements while here in New Zealand. Call me a tightwad.
   My second copy of Typography and Branding is still here, luckily. It was a very limited edition and probably can’t be replaced.