The author, broadcaster and campaigner Sir Ludovic Kennedy has died aged 89.
A former BBC Panorama journalist, Sir Ludovic spent decades investigating miscarriages of justice, including the case of the Birmingham Six.
He contributed to the abolition of the death penalty and was also president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
As a young man, Sir Ludovic joined the Royal Navy and his ship HMS Tartar was involved in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck.
After the war, he attended Oxford University and went on to become a successful journalist.
During his career, he carried out his own investigations into a number of high-profile criminal cases.
For much of his life, Sir Ludovic was a member of the Liberal Party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, and stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate in 1958.
He quit the party in 2001 when the then leader Charles Kennedy refused to endorse assisted dying, and stood for Parliament again unsuccessfully as an independent candidate on a pro-euthanasia platform.
It’s a shame to speak ill of the dead, every man’s death diminishes me, and so on, and the BBC’s liberal culture is glaringly apparent in pretty much every sentence of this hagiography..
Question for you: did these people kill and assault and rape and risk ‘accidentally killing’ so wantonly for lack of fear of the noose, I wonder?
Indeed, was the death penalty in
5 comments:
Without disincentives, they'll act with impunity. By the way, the post is too short. :)
I can't really agree with you on the death penalty for lots of reasons.
But I do think an appropriate deterrent should be in place to stop the lawlessness and lack of morals. Society seems to have swayed in favour of the aggressor and not the victim.
BTW - James needs to make his mind up ;-)
When they took away Capital Punishment they told us the replacement Life sentence would mean Life. Unsurprisingly they lied.
James :-0
Just no pleasing some people, is there?
CherryPie, it's clear that there is little or no deterrent against violent and deadly crime now compared with when there was a death penalty , and unlawful killing, be it divided into 'murder,' 'manslaughter,' 'unlawful killing' and so on are much more common that before - to such an extent, I think, that even the risk of the occasional miscarriage of justice might be worth it for stopping the mob rule and anarcho-tyranny of our major cities. Where you're getting large areas where the rules of law and morality do no prevail, it's essentially like the frontier or a war zone. You can't tame that with gentle methods. I'm saying by trial - not lynchings or other summary executions. And a large part of our political class, being culturally Marxist, sees the society itself and not the criminals as guilty and therefore does not need to punish. They aren't going to put a proper non-deadly deterrent in place because they believe [and not too deep down] that the law-abiding are asking for it.
Hence Banned's point about 'life' - they simply aren't trustworthy, and won't bring sentence to grave incarceration back.
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