Lottery winner is rapist - Govt sez looking at finding ways to stop him winning it

He should have been denied the privilege of playing as part of the conditions of his jail sentence, same goes for all cons. I guess yeh it's too late to try and deny him the winnings now.

See because of the 'absurdity'/ironing of him winning, frankly I would not object to the equally absurd scenario of the money going to rape victim support services - rather than the victims directly. Why not?

Weekend release is an acclimitisation process to integrate you into everyday once more. Playing the lottery is sadly part of that life. Saying 'you can live a normal life at weekends, but don't do anything that gets tabloids up in arms, OK?'

This is just random crazy luck. As much as we don't like it, I think the guy has the right to keep that money - we can't use the legal system to jail him and then throw it out the window because he won money legally but his crime was particularly hateful.

The idea that offenders (esp. repeat ones) be denied certain privileges, of which gambling could include one....maybe it's bad because winning a lot of money may be the catalyst for character reform in this case. I'm glad criminals are not given millions of pounds by the government in exchange for becoming decent law abiding people tho...

If Camelot had simply refused to pay out, and therefore milk the good publicity, what would happen? Actually, how can he claim that money from inside?

So - let's say that this chap said "I don't deserve the moolah - I'd like to give it to a rape charity to help undo some of the harm people like me cause" - what then?

Mark C the odds on that happening SEEM even greater than the odds of a specific individual winning the Lottery at all, but if it did happen then yes that would be very interesting and probably assist his integration back into society although I'm not totally convinced about that either.

The only issue here is a moral one WRT whether or not people who have been deemed unworthy of liberty should be allowed to do so in the future, and also, yes, I find it kind of insulting that anyone actually thinks violent sex offenders are rehabilitable or deserve another chance, but this is really not, technically, the issue at hand.

So what do you suggest - "life should mean life", chemical castration, electric chair?

tho as Howard pointed out this is odd if they're apparently not allowed to play the football pools

but I think he deserves a chance at life after all this time.

why?

Under the current system, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to deprive this man of his winnings.

xpost Mark, why penalize harder, "more destructive" drugs? Obviously irresponsible use of any intoxicating substance should be penalized.

-- VengaDan Perry (djperr...), August 13th, 2004.

i wasn't 'demonizing' anyone. now, using evidence gained under torture is legal, but immoral. same goes for this guy getting $7m. so the two things are not unrelated. basically saying 'life's unfair/shit happens/what're ya gonna do' are not arguments, tehy're flip ways of ducking the problem at hand.

Whatever.

I liked the article Paul Kelly posted the link to. I just kind of wonder what the author did that he's spent so much time in jail himself.

i think this is Dubya's (and could be Blair's next year) Fall campaign slogan, or perhaps the victory chant

people generally feel their sense of justice offended when a violent rapist, actually serving jail time, is allowed to win millions of dollars.
i don't have strong feelings about lottos/gambling either way.

- You don't post five pages of psuedo-analytical bullshit to make a point that can be summed up in three sentences, ergo I can ignore you.

- We are saying the same thing but I don't like the way you're saying it so I'm going to argue with you for no reason.

Fuck all of you.

*A similar tactic is used by the right-wing press for stirring up anti-asylum seeker hatred, "they're sponging off us taxpayers etc etc..." Now, if he'd been an Albanian immigrant as well, then the Great British Public truly would be foaming at the mouth.

http://www.glassamerica.com/stockart/stocker/images/lady-justice/images/lady-justice2.jpg

glib remarks of the 'life's unfair' or 'deal with it' school of Sassy Individualism aren't of much more use, Dan/Suzy

Snowy, I never said that. I may be left of the mainstream in that I think the people baying for this man's money, whether government or victim or relatives, are snide little fuckers. This whole British tabloid mentality of BURN THEM! OH, AND TAKE ALL THEIR ASSETS! that Dave is hating on is even more pernicious and he's spot-on about them. BTW the people who write for tabloids are often posher than those on the broadsheets.

There is also the additional law proviso that if restitution is sought, the aggrieved party must seek it within 15 years or no sale. Alas, no sale.

What is wrong with this whole issue is that the tabloids are being allowed to make demands of the government - and last I checked, Rebekah Wade hasn't been elected an MP.

Also I do believe that offenders, even sex offenders, *can* be rehabilitated and the one thing this furore does is to ensure that either with or without the money, a few lives have been even more derailed than they already were before the doorsteppers got involved.

BTW Tombot, the Guardian is on its second prison correspondent. They are prisoners recruited from one of the many writing programmes in jails and they are usually lifers. One correspondent was released and continues to work for the Guardian. Another day-release person from a nearby prison was allowed to be an intern for my friend when she ran a gallery at an art college. It happens WAY more than you think.

no Dan i didn't mean it literally as per academic qualifications or anything - and i did not mean it to sound like such a dig at you or suzy (it was just that you 2 seemed to post comments most exemplary of the position) - (and i do NOT mean to imply that u & suzy are the only ppl who make them, or that alot of your posts are like that - like alot of the ppl on ilx you can both shoot ppl down in flames with sharp putdowns, but also with powerful articulate arguments ..)
it was a (mebbe piss poor) phrase meant to indicate that i find those kinds of statements...
...that they come across as indications in themselves of some kind of 'toughness' or 'capability' - but one that could be used to belittle almost anyone complaining about almost anything

something related to this happened on that 'shouting at ppl from cars' thread, an angle developed with some posters (tho not u 2 iirc) suggesting that ppl who found it unpleasant/intrusive/rude/hurtful/threatening, instead of some kind of amusing performance art or freelance comedy act, ppl who weren't sharp enough to shout back (or maybe even be up for the violence that the endgame of such encounters might ultimately lead towards), well they were sort of lame or useless or too 'coddled' and probably hadn't experienced 'real hardship' and so had no grounds to complain...

it is a reaction that flows easily and has a seductive psychological/logical quality to it, i know i have been/am guilty of it myself (a related undercurrent on the recent 'chavscum' threads was a sense of how 'qualified' a person was by virtue of their background to have a 'valid' opinion towards sympathy/disdain) - but as a template for prescriptive morality or interpersonal/social behaviour this kind of response seems less a way of focussing attention on the most disadvantaged and more a way of disregarding/maintaining the wrong end of a different problem: i would rather live in a social atmosphere/fabric that didn't respond to 'unfairness' by promoting a kind of thick-skinned self-reliant individualistic darwinian 'toughness' - and regardless of whether that desire sounds unrealistic or ridiculous, (and the extent to which it is inherently contradictory within the economic systems many of us live within blahblah, and whether the loss of such is a price worth paying in order to achieve a greater overall degree of 'efficiency' in material progress/wealth generation (if that's even true)) - i don't think it is an unworthy aim.
(' ...i wouldn't say it was a target, but it's definitely something to aim for..')

(side-issue: one of the most soul-destroying aspects of living through the thatcherite 80's in this country was this 'justifiable' theme that ppl should stop being 'moaning minnies' (yes, that hokey shite was the language of a UK Prime Minister) and that by suitable application of Victorian Fortitude and Grasping Ambition anyone could transcend their circumstances - effectively impossible to argue against without undercutting the Dignity Of The Individual or sounding patronising - but it leads to the socially corrosive ideology that You Are Always Totally Responsible and is a good cop-out for undercutting risk-pooling mechanisms set up on the basis of ppl sometimes Not Being Responsible or Not Being Able To Cope for a while - instead, you end up with (as somebody put it) 'Anybody can be a millionaire, so Everybody's got to try')... Apart from being a bit of a Con job, given how much any attack on the underlying class/money structures got rubbished as 'the politics of envy' (as if that were automatically a bad thing?) and how much they probably remained self-servingly intact, it had enough of that infuriating half-truth quality to it to make it seem sort of obvious - but then half-truths, like half-bricks, are easier to throw around.)

i agree with stevem's 'life is as unfair as we allow it to be' general ideal - and with his conflicted discomfort about this case in particular

of course there is 'unfairness' of circumstance visited upon us by chance & contingency - everything from not being able to choose genetic/situational parental inheritance to geographical/socio-political start-points to time'n'place accidents or killer weather...but i wonder about:
a) the extent to which application of the concept here just is some kind of category error (and whether this is something to be disapproved of even if it is)
b) the extent to which it is culture's job to hold nature at bay rather than accept or exacerbate it

ref. this particular case: there is certainly ironing in the way that the lottery is actually *predicated* on a 'It Could Be YOU' disconnection between the possible reward and any notion of your personal worthiness to receive it -
and i don't think most ppl feel resentment if winners are not saintly, or needy sufferers - but they do want them not to be guilty of vile acts, or already overly 'fortunate' (i.e. already very rich - and i bet inherited wealth would be resented more than self-generated/earned wealth) - for this seems to tip the situation over from being a stroke of good fortune for the innocent to a kind of 'natural' injustice
but is this attempt to back-annotate *some* notion of 'deserving' a mark of muddle-headed fear-fuelled moral-deity old school desperation (perhaps a return to older notions of Capricious Gods (or big CGI-hands) would iron out the, er, ironing) - or is it a somehow admirable attempt to maintain ourselves as moral cultured beings in the face of meaningless chance, to impose some kind of moral order on 'Dumb Luck' ? Isn't maybe that part of what acting as moral agents is supposed to be about ?

i guess i'm not sure that just because a *process* is random(ish) or non-agent-directed it means that we should not then try to apply some moral criteria to the *results* of it, insofar as they do impact the personal/social situation of people - is the alternative the only kind of 'risk pooling' we are beginning to find acceptable ?

(unlike capitalism this post has now collapsed under the weight of its own bullshitty self-contradictions kthxbye)

oops...

First, unless U.K. law is *completely* different than U.S. law on this point, the rape victim(s) are not likely to get a dime of this money. There's this thing called the statute of limitations, that requires you to bring lawsuits for damages within a certain amount of time after the injury occurred or the perpetrator of the injury was identified. In most U.S. states, the statute of limitations for this type of claim is two years, and I suspect that the U.K.'s similar in this regard. In this case, the guy's been in prison since 1989.

However, that analysis flies *right out the window* if the guy was sued within the statute of limitations. Say for instance one of this shmuck's victims sued him in 1989 and won a five million pound judgment, and assume the guy was penniless and unable to pay at the time. That victim *would* be able to collect against the lottery winnings, since she got an enforcable judgment in a timely fashion (please note that this assumes no lapse of the judgment and no discharge of the debt in bankruptcy). There's another quirk -- in some U.S. states, and maybe in the U.K., there is a fund for victims of crime that reimburses some victims for damages that they have suffered. The perp is then expected to repay the victims of crime fund, although most of the time they don't.

Putting all that to one side, what I think is most funny about this thread is that it seems to revolve largely around whether or no it's fair to apply a change in the law retroactively to snatch this guy's winnings. I will tell you that although it is unconstitutional in the U.S. to retroactively increase or impose a punishment upon a criminal, I kinda doubt that invalidating this guy's lottery win by changing the law would be considered a retroactive 'punishment' in the U.S. I know that may sound ridiculous, but let me tell you, it's so.

(x-post)

I think I basically agree with ENRQ that it's vile, but that there's not much you can do about it, at least not retrospectively. I think there was just a slightly heartless, contemptuous tone detected in some of the other comments, perhaps incorrectly. As Dan said, I don't think people really disagree much about the fundamentals.

The national lottery feels different in this context than other ways of getting (in nearly said 'earning') money, because there's no element of deserts to it. That sparkling "It's YOU" hand of fate used in the early advertising looms large in our imagination. We struggle to cope with its randomness, and when there's a chance to say "Well that person really shouldn't have been the one" - a case where we really do have something concrete against the undeserving winner - then we look to the powers that be to do something about it. It doesn't make much rational sense, no.

I suppose it would be easy enough to bar prisoners from entering the lotto in future, but to be honest, I suspect the revulsion would be the same even if a rapist who had already served his sentence were to win.

The Guardian's prison correspondents have only been able to be paid for their columns in the last couple of years. Here's the reader's editor on the issue

In any case, I don’t see the “unfairness” of his win, at least beyond the meaning of “unfair” where it’s “unfair” that, say, a child should have cancer. Karmically unfair, we might say. But in a legalistic sense, in a logical sense, even in certain moral senses, it’s entirely fair: he’s serving the sentence assigned to him for his crimes; he was allowed the privilege of days among the public; while there, he engaged in a transaction all members of the public are invited to take part in. The whole point of a lottery, after all, is that there’s no reckoning of merit involved. (They could use this as their next ad campaign: “If this asshole can win 7m, so can you!”) Until such day as we have some sort of bizarre open-ended sentencing—“15 years and public referendums to determine whether you should be allowed to have good things happen to you in future”—this is simply, I dunno, life-as-lived.

For the record, I tend not to like the way certain privileges are stripped from those convicted of crimes, even beyond their having served the sentence given them. Voting, for instance, or student financial aid for people convicted of drug crimes.

Writing or journalism is a profession which actually needs ex-offenders to shed articulate and informed light on the prison system in Britain. Also you have to keep your whistle fairly clean in most cases, so it's a safe place to go and it would be hypocritical to deny prisoners access to certain accomplishments. REHABILITATION, people. You have to realise that there are some institutions where there are five suicide attempts a day, and there is much abuse of people who are already being adequately punished.

When considering policy it is generally best not to be swayed by tabloid-style hysteria and to be as emotionless as possible. Also not to succumb to snideness as lived by the evil Blunkett (normally I really approve of politicians who represent the area they were born and raised in as is rare in UK). I do often wonder if society is making it harder for women to deal with rape because of two-minute hates like these.

Statute of limitations in this case is 15 years and this win happened too late for a compensation claim. The victim should have more counselling to deal with the unpleasant surprise, but baying for the guy's cash is in a different and altofgether grasping league, at least to me. I think victim restitution for crimes which don't involve money in the first place (rape is about power, not about money) have to be about the things that money can't buy. We do not want to send the message that money buys psychological happiness. How could it?

perhaps this is based on extensive psychological research that shows all rape victims have forgotten about it or are fully recovered and forgiving of the perpetrator after 6 yrs
(after all, how else could the number possibly have been arrived at ?)

(ps - suzy: i reread thread - u indeed did not say that: my apologies for misrep...i think it's maybe just a general impression i'd picked up from yr various other posts that you might have those tendencies...)

xpost

A statute of limitations seems entirely a good thing, and it is passed here, and nothing can be done.

I think when someone is deemed to have completed their sentence and is allowed to participate in society again, there should be no further limitations. If gambling is forbidden with his current status, then he was not entitled to take part in the lottery: in that case, we give him his pound back and disallow the win. I would be very pleased to see the £7m go to women's shelters, rape counselling charities and so on, but I don't think Camelot would be obliged to do anything but roll it over to a bigger jackpot next time. The slightly awkward problem might be that only spectacular wins would be picked up - have no prisoners banned from gambling won smaller amounts?

I do believe firmly in rehabilitation, but I don't believe that it is always possible, for various reasons. Upthread someone says that this man was twice before convicted of rape and released early for good behaviour, and then raped again. This seems to me to indicate that rehabilitation is unlikely in this case, and I am inclined to believe that we sometimes have to accept that and keep someone locked up. I'm not suggesting that this is a certain case of that, since such a decision should certainly be based on more than a couple of summary sentences - a thorough assessment is needed by professionals. This issue seems to me to have no connection to the lottery issue at all, and I think conflating the two is of no use.

Will he say, “it won’t change a thing, I’ll still keep working”?

That’s a worse crime than rape.

That’s a tough one.