Justice for the people

I can't help but comment on 2 high profile murder cases that have taken place in Australia over the past 12 months given some of the reports I have seen today. The first is the Thomas Kelly case and the downgrading of his murder charge and the second is the Jill Meagher case in Victoria.
I can only imagine that in the Thomas Kelly case and the downgrading of his charge to manslaughter that the prosecution have taken this option as they feel certain of a manslaughter conviction without a retrial if a murder conviction failed. The problem for the prosecution is that they will have to prove beyond doubt that he intended to kill Kelly. Given that Kelly’s actual death was because his head hit the ground and not due to the punch they probably feel that a jury would not find him guilty of willful premeditated murder. While I understand that if Kelly had not been hit his head would not have hit the ground the prosecution still have to prove that the perpetrator wanted to kill his target. Given the accused man had assaulted 3 or 4 others that night and none of them were seriously injured probably helped convince the prosecutors that they would be better served with a guilty plea of manslaughter rather than pushing for a murder conviction and fail. What will be interesting is to see what criminal history the accused has. As in the Jill Meagher case if it turns out the assailant has a long serious criminal record of assaults and should not have been on the street in the first place then the DPP could look at appealing any manslaughter conviction if it can.

This brings me to the Jill Meagher case and our parole laws and repeat violent offenders. The problem for our justice system is that they cannot really know what is going on in the human mind. Bayley (Meagher’s confessed murderer) himself has admitted that he lied about his “rehabilitation” to get parole and the parole board that assessed him to be fit for parole agreed when in fact he was not fit. In this case we are dealing with a psychopath and a psychopath is not a normal human condition. Psychopaths are not bound by normal social conventions or normal human reasoning or behaviour for that matter and so should be treated accordingly in the Justice system in my opinion.
There is no real rehabilitation option for people like Bayley because he himself is not bound by normal human constraints. The problem is that in this day and age we have been convinced by the "bleeding heart do gooder's" that we can help these criminals and that we have a responsibility to help them and if we don’t try rehabilitation to help them we are no better than the people we lock away. I come back to my first point we can never really fully understand or know what is going on in the mind of a psychopath like Bayley. The fact is he and criminals like him use our desire to help to gain parole and as with Bayley just so they can re-offend. How many chances to re-offend must a psychopath like Bayley be given with each crime escalating over time? Our responsibility in fact should be to the safety of law abiding people as well as the criminals we incarcerate. He was already in the one place fitting for such a person, safely locked away from reach of his deranged fantasy world in a place where we would have been protected from him and he would have been protected from himself surely that is the responsibility of our justice system. The question we must ask ourselves in the Thomas Kelly case is do we have another Bayley in our care and how many chances do we give him?