From a correspondent in the UK: A group of teenage boys gang rape two girls on two separate occasions, film the crimes and laugh about doing it. As a punishment, they are condemned to community service, with Mr Justice Nicholas Rowland explaining at Southampton Crown Court last month that ‘I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.’
The decision did not go down well with the public, many of whom have grown restless at court decisions, and struggle to understand sentencing guidelines which seem alien to natural justice.
The judge has stayed true to form; in 2023 he handed out a suspended sentence to a paedophile found with the most serious grade of child abuse images, despite five previous convictions. (As it is, the offender failed to abide by the conditions of his suspended sentence and went to jail anyway.) Most people would regard unpaid work as a small price to pay to avoid prison, but many criminals are not future orientated enough to see things that way.
In the more recent case, the judge chose to be lenient because the two rapists were not only young, but too stupid to understand what they had done. This is not unusual – many vicious and violent criminals escape serious punishment because the law sees low intelligence as mitigation. They are “unfit” to be tried, to be held accountable for their actions. However evil those actions are.
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The Price of Liberty 
Power of judges expanding, not being curbed
This week, a federal judge in Montana cancelled oil and gas leases on 1.5 MILLION acres of land in the State of Wyoming (a different district). And more acres in Montana and the Dakotas.
Cowboy State Daily reports the action and the impact. The State of Wyoming alone will lose $330 million in royalties and fees – not counting the taxes paid by the people who work getting and transporting the natural gas, and the taxes as the money circulates through the local economies. Now, as lovers of liberty, we are of mixed feelings about the bureaucrats and politicos down in Cheyenne (or Helena, or Bismarck and Pierre) getting less money. But it is the people that won’t get paid because that oil and gas will stay in the ground, instead of fueling the economy, that really take it in the shorts. And because we know those politicians and bureau-rats won’t cut their spending when they don’t get those royalty dollars. They’ll just raise taxes and continue to line their pockets and those of their political cronies and big business.
So why did this judge do this? Including going outside his district?
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