It happens with outrageous regularity in the UK. Now it seems the insidious disease of guilty, hand wringing, reverse racism which has thoroughly eaten into British politics, the judiciary and public service has metastasized here.
Chamanjot Singh killed his wife Manpreet Kaur with a box cutter after stabbing or slashing her 22 times. Yet he only received a six year sentence from Justice Peter McClellan, who agreed with the defence of provocation, stating Singh was:
“An immature individual … who was caught up in a situation that he was unable to handle. The offender formed the view that his marriage was about to end and he would lose all his money and have nowhere to live. This caused him to lose self-control.''
Maybe it contributed to him losing self control, but the real cause of his actions are his personality. That’s not an excuse for stabbing your wife 22 times in a fit of slighted rage, even if she did threaten to have you deported.
Understandably, Manpreet Kaur’s family are very upset and feel let down by the judge. Even though the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter, the maximum sentence available to the judge is 25 years. Justice McClellan could have given Singh a lot more than 6 years … 20, with a minimum of 15, followed by deportation? Probably fairer. We don’t want to feed and clothe the bastard for the rest of his life.
Juries have been known to accept a defence of provocation to downgrade a murder conviction to manslaughter, but I probably wouldn’t have if I’d been on this jury. In New South Wales, the defence of provocation relies on Section 23 of the Crimes Act, but it must meet subsection 2(b):
“That conduct of the deceased was such as could have induced an ordinary person in the position of the accused to have so far lost self-control as to have formed an intent to kill, or to inflict grievous bodily harm upon the deceased.”
That should mean an ordinary person in Australian society ie. an adult who has been brought up in Australia’s mainstream, Western cultural values. What someone might or might not do in another culture should have no bearing on the verdict. We should not interpret the intent of our laws through the lenses of various foreign cultures to excuse behaviour by emotionally volatile immigrants.
I don’t believe what Chamanjot Singh’s wife allegedly said to him was sufficient to induce an ordinary Australian to so far lose self-control that they stab someone 22 times. That should have been the basis of the jury’s judgment and I would have found him guilty of murder. Given the lack of premeditation, there would be sufficient scope for the judge to hand down a sentence of 20 years, so if Justice McClellan had done his job with a harsher sentence on the manslaughter conviction, the jury’s verdict of murder or manslaughter really wouldn’t matter that much.
A judge and / or jury getting it wrong does not justify calls for abolishing the defence of provocation. Sometimes people are provoked to extreme reactions, such as catching someone molesting one of their kids. In such circumstances, S23.2(b) above is probably met.
If the defence of provocation is removed, people in circumstances like the Texas case above will claim self defence. It may or may not be bogus, but juries will accept it, because the alternative is a murder conviction. Thus, we will have at least some rage or revenge based killings ending in no conviction at all, when juries think the deceased at least partly brought it on themselves.
Even though the jury in the Singh case accepted a defence of provocation when it probably shouldn’t have, the judge should have noted the verdict was contentious and used the sentencing range to impose a penalty not too far from what he would have given for an unpremeditated murder in a fit of rage. So why didn’t Justice McClellan do this?
I haven’t read the judge’s summation to the jury or his full sentencing remarks, but I get the sense from the circumstances that had Chamanjot Singh been Charlie Smith, he would have got significantly more than 6 years. This is why I suggested there may be elements of reverse racism at work here.
I don’t know exactly what was in Justice McClellan’s head, but my gut feel is that Singh’s cultural background was to some degree accepted as an excuse, in that his cultural and ethnic background and experiences were believed to have given him less self control and this was a mitigating factor in sentencing.
Should we accept the proposition that lesser standards of behaviour should be expected of brown and black people who come from cultures where women are treated as property and honour killings are accepted? Do we then extend this to (even partially) forgiving corruption by immigrants because they have come from cultures where graft is the norm?
If we do, shouldn’t we then discriminate against these groups by setting the bar higher for any of their members to be allowed to live here in the first place? If their culture, ethnicity, religion or even race really is a mitigating factor when they transgress our rules, then statistically, we should expect more unacceptable behaviour from such groups. Ceteris paribus, these groups must be less likely to add value to our society. Consequently, we should only accept people from these societies who demonstrate high value skills in other areas, in order to offset the increase in expected problems.
If you don’t agree with the above claim, then we should NOT allow culture, ethnicity, religion or race as a mitigating factor in punishing unacceptable behaviour. The claim that this does not occur here is absurd: ask police Sergeant Adam Wolsey.
Of course, people from peasant or tribal cultures, with alien religions, values and social customs really WILL have far more difficulty fitting into Australian society and providing the value add that most of us want from immigrants who largely assimilate. That doesn’t mean we should excuse them when they misbehave.
Hand wringers interpret the “should” in “we should expect lesser (or rather, “different”) standards of behaviour from people of certain cultural backgrounds” as having a moral meaning ie. we should feel sympathy for their lack of ability to navigate our society and provide more help, not punishment, as if the fault is really our own.
People who want their social policy constructed from evidence, rather than wet left ideology will interpret the “should” as having an operational meaning ie. if we let large numbers of these people in, we should expect a higher frequency of unacceptable behaviour from them. Thus, we should apply stricter immigration criteria to people from these groups, cutting numbers and requiring evidence of some degree of prior exposure to and embrace of Western cultural values. Additionally, we should far more strongly use deportation and revocation of citizenship as deterrents to such culturally conditioned behaviour.
An alternative view is that instead of accepting cultural background as a mitigating factor, it should be an aggravating factor. Immigrants who come here, see that the rules are different and reject them should be punished more harshly, both as a lesson to others and for the sheer affront of asking (in many cases begging) to come here, then turning around and rejecting our rules and standards of behaviour.
If we are strict about deporting foreign criminals (or even just troublemakers) and revoking their citizenship, then a legal system in which culture, ethnicity, religion or race is explicitly disallowed as a mitigating factor and sentencing is based purely on the nature and direct circumstances of the offence is probably most in keeping with the principles of Liberalism. This does punish immigrants more harshly, since they are deported at the end of their sentence.
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