Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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Does NZ have Double Jeopardy laws?
Maybe you’ve already written on this Graeme?We do. But given that people have asked for the case to be looked at again, should police ignore a prime suspect?
One way of the re-look going is surely: police have looked at the evidence again, and have decided not to continue looking further because AAT did it and they’d be wasting further time looking for someone else?
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Arthur Allan Thomas has been required by police to provide an alibi ...
Well, that's not accurate. The Police can't require anything like that.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Russell Brown,
On a lighter note, you can test yourself against the rest of the internet in this find Damascus on a map game.
I was 64 miles away, which I thought was okay on such a small map.
You know you can zoom, right? Also, I was pleased just to hit Syria. I can, however, do simple maths under pressure :-)
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
No satisfaction of the commentariat’s visceral desire for vengeance.
Bloody law and order types!
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
At the end of the day, the message being sent from this whitewash is that the GCSB is effectively a law unto itself (and to a lesser extent the Police).
You know that the (acting) Head of the GCSB at the time of the interception lost his job, right?
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Speeding isn’t a criminal offence.
But it can be. Under the Land Transport Act , s.7(2): … [it can be dangerous driving]
Perhaps we can try an analogy.
If I had made the outlandish claim "having consensual sex isn’t a crime" would you have responded "But it can be. Under the Crimes Act, s.130 … [it can be incest]"?
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
at more than 50km/h over the limit you can also be charged with careless, dangerous or reckless driving.
Can be charged is not the same as are guilty of. The additional requirement of dangerousness is highly likely to be present, but still must be proved.
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Isn’t there always an intent requirement for manslaughter, in that you always have to have intended to do whatever it was that resulted in the death?
No. The manslaughter convictions of John Horrell (who owned an aircraft maintenance company), and Ronald Potts (who was a senior engineer at that company), who were convicted for failing to ensure there was proper supervision of the workers who repaired a helicopter, are classic examples of gross negligence short of any "intention" being the basis for a manslaughter conviction.
see: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10507609
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to izogi,
Surely it should be near the top somewhere, and probably more than just a single person? Otherwise there’s just a big motivation to mis-manage departments so they can avoid legal responsibility.
Civil liability in court for the department as a whole, and employment liability for individuals .
Loss of employment is what appropriately happened in the Parliamentary Service over the Andrea Vance/Peter Dunne emails and access card logs. The Head of the Service took responsibility for there being poor systems and resigned.
I understood that at least some of those with responsibility in the GCSB at the time of the Dotcom interception had resigned too. Hugh Wolfensohn, whom I understand to have been the legal adviser, and was the Acting Director at the time, was placed on "gardening leave" and is reported not to have returned.
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Section 35(1) then designates this as an offence (without any necessary mens rea element)
I refer you to Brooker's Transportation Law, which, with appropriate references, notes:
To justify a dangerous driving conviction, there must be not only a situation which is objectively dangerous, but also some fault on the driver's part which caused that situation.
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The driver must be proved to have driven with knowledge of the circumstances which made the driving dangerous, but need not have directed his or her mind to the dangerIf all you have is speeding, you haven't committed a criminal offence. You must not only have speed, you must also have danger.