Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to BenWilson,
Check! That looks what what both the Act and the guide says.
The problem with the guidance is that it doesn’t even look like you need permission.
I meant to say, I think:
The problem is that that guidance makes it look like you can’t even ask for permission until after the decision is made (ie it looks like the pre-decision ban is total).
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to BenWilson,
Pretty clear that you need permission to go further (although I can’t tell if even that is possible). Afterwards you can say it was a suicide without the coroner’s permission. That’s what I’m reading. You appear to need permission to say more than the very basic facts, though.
After a Coroner has declared a death a suicide, you can publicly state it was a suicide.
You can get permission to state more, such as the means used.
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to BenWilson,
But the Act trumps the guidance, doesn’t it? Newspapers have surely hit this hundreds of times, got their lawyers to look at the law, and then realized that it’s clear enough in the Act itself that the highly counter-intuitive idea that coroners have a perpetual right to deny freedom of reporting of any suicide is counter-intuitive because it’s false.
I am confident you need permission to report the particulars of a self-inflicted death before the Coroner has made a decision.
The problem with the guidance is that it doesn’t even look like you can get permission.
The problem with the law is that you do need permission.
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to BenWilson,
But reading the Act itself, I would think that chapter is contradicting the Act somewhat.
Yep. That was what I was trying to get at. You read the guidance, and it doesn't even look like you can get permission until after the finding has been made.
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And if you hit another car that’s moving, the impact speed may be doubled meaning the outcome will be twice as bad.
Not four times as bad? Or some other even higher number? I'd have thought driving/crashing at 100km/h was much more dangerous than driving/crashing at 50km/h.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to BenWilson,
If this was not against the law, they’d be out of jail sooner. The amount of time spent in jail for cannabis is a real thing, real people’s lives rotting in jail over something millions of NZers have done regularly.
No. I'm saying that, for example someone gets two years imprisonment for burglary and one month for possession of class A, for a total sentence of two years and release after one year (because that's how concurrent sentences work). If class A drugs hadn't been found on them, the total sentence would be two years, with release after one year.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Sacha,
because those statistics are published?
I have just OIAed the stats, but my confidence comes from knowing how criminal sentencing works. e.g. Police suspect someone is a burglar, and get a search warrant to search for stolen goods. In the course of the search they find some drugs (getting money for this may have been the reason for the burglary). They charge both. The person gets two years for burglary and one month for the possession charge, to be served simultaneously.
Will happen with a bunch of offences. Drunken assault in a pub or street. Police arrest and conduct a search incident to arrest, find drug utensils etc. When you get to sentencing it all comes out in the wash. You can't sentence someone to community work if they're going to prison for something else, and it would be wrong to fine them (just setting them up to fail when they're released), so they get short sentence for the minor offending.
I'm not saying that this is every case. But I do think it will be a lot of them. And hopefully we'll know in 20 working days or so.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Russell Brown,
Mallard just pulled his “no one is ever jailed for pot possession” out of his ass – and carried on even after he was shown evidence of how wrong he is.
You need to contrast between those sent to prison for drug possession alone, and those sent to prison for burglary and drug possession or receiving stolen goods and drug possession. None of the statistics quoted make this distinction. I am confident that many (I suspect most, and perhaps not far short of all) people given a prison sentence for simple possession are serving that prison sentence simultaneously with a prison sentence for some other, more serious, offence.
There will be some who have served a prison term because, for example, of failure to comply with a community sentence given for drug possession, but people sentenced to prison for drug possession and nothing more will be very few.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Russell Brown,
But that $500k fine only applies to a body corporate, not an individual.
Well, for individuals, the maximum fine is the same then. $10,000. But vastly different for bodies corporate.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Russell Brown,
By comparison, the penalties relating to cannabis under the Misuse of Drugs Act are much more severe: three months jail for possession and eight years for supply or even growing plants.
And soon to be ten years for possession of a book about growing the plants (or 14 years if you ordered it from Amazon).
I would note that the maximum fine for drug dealing/growing/etc. offences is substantially lower than that applying to other psychoactives covered by this regime.