The value of a life

Not much, according to a judge in Sydney today, in another example of that strange parallel universe that the justice system seems to occupy at times.

Shane Miles was a publican in Sydney, killed in a bar fight in 2004.  He was struck by a bar stool thrown during the fight, and suffered a fractured skull and brain damage, from which he never recovered, life support being turned off a few days later.

Joseph Leota, 29,  Taniela Taufa Motuapuaka, 26, Etuate Taiseni, 30, and Aminiasi Tuifua, 32, were convicted by Justice Megan Latham in the King Street Supreme Court today for the manslaughter of Mr Miles.   They were originally charged with murder, but the Director of Public Prosecutions later accepted their guilty pleas to manslaughter.  Leota received three years and six months for manslaughter and four years for inflicting grievously bodily harm, Motuapuaka three years and four years respectively for the same offences, Taiseni two years and two years five months, and Tuifua two years two months and two years eight months.

Following a fight involving Leota, he called his mates. Motuapuaka had swung a bar stool which glanced off the shoulder of a barmaid and hit Shane Miles. They then went on to assault another patron of the pub, the one who Leota had fought with earlier, including throwing a chair at him and kicking him in the head.  (Brave guys aren’t they … bring 3 of your mates to help you fight one guy … real tough!!).

So, these brave fuckwits get 2 to 4 years for killing one man and beating the shit out of another.  Sound right to anyone except a judge, and maybe their own close relatives???  Once again, the judge said lots of right things about taking into account the victim, being an innocent bystander in the “what can only be described as a brutish, cowardly and uncivilised response” by Mr Leota to the punch he had received in the initial fight. What resulted was “a display of senseless violence” which had badly affected the family.  But the supposed contrition of the offenders seems to have carried much more weight, as did their early guilty plea to manslaughter.

To my mind, these sentences seem very light.  I’d also argue that its murder when you start swinging large heavy objects like bar stools around … even if there was no intent to kill, its a realistic possibility that you should be able to foresee - I think if you are prepared to act violently and take risks like that which could kill someone, you should not be able to get off lightly by saying “I didn’t mean to kill them”.  You took the action, the risk was there, the result was foreseeable, and you should pay a heavy price for it.  Likewise when people go into a fight with weapons like knives, baseball bats, iron bars, etc, or start kicking people in the head …the possibility of killing someone is realistic and foreseeable, and if it does happen, I don’t think you should be able to claim you didn’t do it intentionally.  (I also think that you shouldn’t be able to claim being drunk or affected by drugs as a defence to a crime …should have thought of the possible consequences before you got drunk or drugged.  If not you assumed a risk and should pay for the consequences of your actions.)

Thinking about why courts hand out what most of us think are lenient sentences, I think a lot of this is to do with the fact that they see people who have committed some very evil crimes, and so some crimes which I might see as dreadful, are, relative to others they get to deal with, not so bad.