Friday, October 21, 2011

The strictest law often causes the most serious wrong

Cicero's point is that law applied without the ability to adapt to specific situations can be grossly unjust.

The new provisions from Bill C-10 requiring mandatory jail sentences for relatively small amounts of marijuana are just such 'strictest law'.

Either the law will be ignored (which reduces respect for the law) or some hapless college students, say growing dope in their dorm, will spend time in jail learning to be criminals rather than, say, computer programmers. Bill C-10 is a bad idea.

2 comments:

David said...

To say Bill C-10 is a bad idea is a gross understatement!

The Rat said...

Fine point. Do you have a better solution to the problem of judges ignoring the will of parliament, obviously stated by parliament's desire to restrict the exercise of judge's "good judgement"? In a fight between judges and parliament I stand with parliament. That may lead to the injustice of over-punishment of a few special-circumstance criminals but I will take that in place of the general under-sentencing of a lot of criminals.