Scotland could become one of the first countries to establish a specific crime for mass environmental destruction as championed by late Scots barrister Polly Higgins.
It needs to change then, at least for stuff like this. It’s too serious to let off on a technicality.
Letting criminals off on technicalities is one of the things that put us down this dark road in the first place. Justice is far more important and letting them off is not justice, I don’t care how the original U.S. system was set up.
Well the general principle is that you can’t be punished for behavior that was legal when you did it. Otherwise you open the door to “doing X is illegal now” and then locking everyone who was documented doing X in the last several years.
Which maybe sounds nice when it’s destroying the climate… but it’s less nice when it’s gay marriage, alcohol consumption, owning X book, etc.
If you have a government that is willing to do that, then they’ll just tyrannize and abuse you in any other way they see fit and you already have huge enough problems for which not having a provision like the kind I’m talking about would not prevent.
You can’t stop tyranny at the expense of injustice. It simply doesn’t work that way. You’ll cause the very tyranny you hope to prevent by destroying people’s faith in a system like that – that’s actually what’s been happening here.
It needs to change then, at least for stuff like this. It’s too serious to let off on a technicality.
Letting criminals off on technicalities is one of the things that put us down this dark road in the first place. Justice is far more important and letting them off is not justice, I don’t care how the original U.S. system was set up.
It needs to go.
Well the general principle is that you can’t be punished for behavior that was legal when you did it. Otherwise you open the door to “doing X is illegal now” and then locking everyone who was documented doing X in the last several years.
Which maybe sounds nice when it’s destroying the climate… but it’s less nice when it’s gay marriage, alcohol consumption, owning X book, etc.
Funny how quickly people forget that they’re supporting authoritarianism just because it happens to line up with their belief system in one instance.
If you have a government that is willing to do that, then they’ll just tyrannize and abuse you in any other way they see fit and you already have huge enough problems for which not having a provision like the kind I’m talking about would not prevent.
You can’t stop tyranny at the expense of injustice. It simply doesn’t work that way. You’ll cause the very tyranny you hope to prevent by destroying people’s faith in a system like that – that’s actually what’s been happening here.