I second this motion to vote.

goes back to hibernating 

I'm concerned that this all seems to have been handled in a rather arbitrary manner, without any serious attempts to reach out to the Court and without any real attempts to consider the minutiae of the issue.

I agree with the Chief Justice. This proposal imposes rather arbitrary limits on the Court which does not allow it flexibility to consider the context. This is particularly so for Contempt of Court.

Imagine this: someone is accused of espionage, a crime which carries a two-year ban. They could refuse to hand over incriminating evidence so they don't get convicted. What punishment do they get for doing this? A conviction for Contempt of Court with a maximum six-month ban. They have just effectively reduced their sentence by eighteen months by not cooperating with the Court!

Now, you may think this is a far-fetched scenario but in the recent case about Shangyuen's campaign to become LC, I banned him for eight months. This would have been too long under the proposed legislation. Yet, I gave him eight months because his refusal to cooperate with the Court meant he may well have avoided conviction on the charge of Organised Crime (which would have carried a heavy penalty of, I estimate, a six-month ban).

Hopefully I have shown that giving exact sentencing limits is a bad idea. They don't allow for complexity. While I think the Court may benefit from some broad guidelines to aid it in determining what range of sentences are appropriate; this proposal is way too prescriptive. I think this is a bad law.

P.S. At the very least, please remove the sentencing limit of Contempt of Court; but don't think this will solve the underlying problem: Shangyuen's sentence shows that the Court needs to be empowered to deal with complexity more broadly (not merely that sentencing limits on Contempt of Court are problematic).

As this draft was edited less than half a day ago, I will not bring this to vote until the required three day debate period has finished (no need to motion or second again).

I'm glad that our High Court justices are giving their opinions on this bill. I wasn't entirely sold on voting for this proposal in the first place because I think that these crimes have context and that should decide whatever sentence the High Court gives to people.

(03-09-2021, 02:19 AM)Nat Wrote: P.S. At the very least, please remove the sentencing limit of Contempt of Court; but don't think this will solve the underlying problem: Shangyuen's sentence shows that the Court needs to be empowered to deal with complexity more broadly (not merely that sentencing limits on Contempt of Court are problematic).

Hmm. I removed the sentencing limits for contempt, so the sentence *could* be infinite if they refuse to cooperate with the court.

(03-11-2021, 07:25 PM)Apatosaurus Wrote:

(03-09-2021, 02:19 AM)Nat Wrote: P.S. At the very least, please remove the sentencing limit of Contempt of Court; but don't think this will solve the underlying problem: Shangyuen's sentence shows that the Court needs to be empowered to deal with complexity more broadly (not merely that sentencing limits on Contempt of Court are problematic).

Hmm. I removed the sentencing limits for contempt, so the sentence *could* be infinite if they refuse to cooperate with the court.

And the three-day counter resets again...

If you're still planning to make changes, I'd recommend that you withdraw your motion to bring this to vote.

I've been rather confused by the process behind this whole amendment. Considering the poll only seems to have had like three people total voting I'm not sure I'd call it a particularly representative sample.

I'm just going to echo the comments of everyone before me who finds this proposal and the suggested limits to be a bad idea.

This has been brought to vote here.

This has failed.