| Author | Comment | ||
|---|---|---|---|
MrsTosh |
Ivan Milat |
Lead | |
|
Now we know it's pretty "warm" at the moment and some lucky people have air-conditioning at home. We have a fan and we sweat like normal
people do when it's hot. Now apparently Ivan Milat chopped his finger off in protest of the bad air-conditioning at Goulburn Gaol? Now really!!!
Mrs Tosh HFG
|
|||
Sebastionbear |
|||
|
I have two things to say about that Mrs T,
1. Are you sure it wasn't the finger in the finger dip at the party you attended? 2. Have you thought he might be trying to escape from gaol - a little bit at a time...............
Cheers, Craig
When was the last time you just got up and went for a drive? Not to anywhere not for anything, just for drive. You see, motorcyclists do it all the time, so why don't human beings? Jeremy Clarkson |
|||
MrsTosh |
|||
Mrs Tosh HFG
|
|||
sirion06 |
|||
|
If he had had the BIG NEEDLE you would not have this option Tracey, and we as tax payers would not be affording him the luxury of hospital AIR CONDITIONING.
Michael |
|||
armybguide |
|||
|
Needs to make the next cut around the region of his larynx in my humble opinion.
Ken Pyke
GTR-AUS 118 Ulyssses 35827 1998 Kawasaki GTR 1000 Green 2008 Kawasaki GTR 1400 Black "Le Noir" Lives Dimboola Vic Works Telfer WA |
|||
sirion06 |
|||
|
Could have the lid right off the can now Ken.
Michael |
|||
MrsTosh |
|||
|
Mrs Tosh HFG
|
|||
b4cchaplain |
|||
MrsTosh wrote: |
|||
Rossco |
|||
|
Milat is one reason I believe in the death sentence as the ultimate penalty. What he did puts him outside of the idea of being treated as a human My ideas and
thoughts.
|
|||
MrsTosh |
|||
|
We discussed capital punishment at work today. The last man to hang in Australia was Ronald Ryan. He was hung the year before I was born. Some of you
may be old enought to remember it? Now, we know Milat is not innocent of his crimes by any means, but bringing back capital punishment isn't the answer
either. Having said that I truly don't know if there is an answer. Many millions of innocent people have died at the hands of misguided justice. Many
even children. Our own history has teenage boys being hung for such punile crimes. Being flogged within and inch of their lives. Then there's torture.
Even today there's women stoned to death because they were raped and dare tell of it. Thousand upon thousands were put to the stake for so called heracy.
They are in prison. They should not and do not have the same rights as we do. They have blown the right to live freely. A life sentence should be just that. LIFE. Anyway. Dunno what the answer is? To you Brisbane folk. You should go check out Boggo Road Gaol. It's up the road from Mr Tosh's folks. It closed in the 90's I think and what a freaky place! The tours were run by ex prisoners. Not sure if they do that now? Or you Sandgropers should check out Fremantle prison. The convicts that were there built the prison. Some cells would be as small as your bathroom. They were given a bible to read and little else. I took some amazing B&W photos there. Then to the Poms. Have you done a tour of the Tower of London? The London Dungeons? The utter, UTTER cruelty that was done in the name of justice! Things like the rack and the iron maiden are just too horrible and when you really see them. Or when you see a life size replica of the wooden platforms used for public beheadings. I couldn't even walk up the steps! Mike Richards February 2, 2007 Page 1 of 3 | Single page TOMORROW is the 40th anniversary of the last judicial hanging in Australia, the execution in Melbourne of Ronald Ryan for the shooting murder of prison officer George Hodson, 41, during an escape from Pentridge Prison in 1965. Apart from an occasion to remember Australia's last official neck-breaking, the anniversary of Ryan's hanging will be observed as a signal moment in our political history: it marks the event that prompted state governments still retaining the death penalty to cut the crimson thread running through Australia's history and abolish capital punishment. We remember Ryan now as an unlikely candidate for the gallows, a small-time crook whose sanctioned execution by the Victorian government of Liberal premier Sir Henry Bolte caused a firestorm of community opposition, the scale and intensity of which dwarfs most modern-day protests. It ensured that no government anywhere in the country would politically risk imposing the death penalty again. Victoria abolished the penalty in 1975. The last state to do so, Western Australia, abolished it in 1984. Ryan's historical notoriety derives from his being the last man to hang but also from the extraordinary campaign of public and media protest mounted in his name in the summer of 1966-67. For many of the protesters, myself included, the hanging of Ryan represents an important moment in their political awakening. As a child, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks argued with his father about the Ryan hanging, and he counts the case as significant in his political development. The late Tasmanian premier Jim Bacon, who spent his teenage years in Victoria, said he, too, was politicised by the execution. The hanging propelled me into involvement with the Labor Party as well. As a university student organising the campus protests in which students from across the political spectrum mounted a round-the-clock vigil on the steps of Parliament House in January 1967, I felt revulsion at the idea of such a coldblooded judicial killing. That feeling of disgust has never left me. Most present-day Australians who were teenagers or older in 1967 can tell you exactly where they were at 8am on February 3 in that year. For those who had some more prominent role to play in the execution drama, the emotional scars run even deeper and, 40 years on, those still with us say they will never get over it. A prominent TV journalist covering the execution threw up in a prison toilet after witnessing the hanging, and spoke in favour of abolition for years afterwards. Another journalist witness, Brian Morley, from 3AW, went to the execution with an open mind about the death penalty. To this day he cannot speak about what he saw without weeping. I was not aware until he spoke about it at the launch of my biography of Ryan in 2002 that Barry Jones, who led the anti-hanging campaign in 1967, had been so emotionally affected by Ryan's execution that he had never so much as referred to it in public till then. "I felt a terrible sense of personal responsibility for Ronald Ryan's death," Jones writes in his just published autobiography. "If I had worked harder, networked more effectively, thought more strategically, would the outcome have been different?" Thoughts of personal responsibility also had an impact on a central but unlikely figure in the case. I know from my interviews many years ago with Justice Sir John Starke that he was deeply affected by Ryan's hanging. Starke was a life-long abolitionist, who by a quirk of fate found himself on the Supreme Court bench as the trial judge in Ryan's prosecution for murder, and was bound to pass the mandatory death sentence when a guilty verdict was reached by the jury. I am quite sure that Starke worried about Ryan and his meeting with the hangman until the day he died in 1994. As the years have rolled by, new generations appear intrigued by the Ryan story, and public fascination has not diminished. So what was it about the Ryan case that has created this enduring interest and concern among many Australians, this blaze of anger that smoulders still for some of us as milestones such as the present one approach? It was surely the dramatic nature of the case itself, but it was also the cultural and political climate of the 1960s, when all kinds of established social mores were under challenge from a more confident and assertive generation of Australians. Certainly, the Ryan case was marked with tragedy and drama from the beginning. The biggest police manhunt in the state's history followed the escape, particularly after Ryan and Peter Walker, who escaped with him, committed still further offences. They first staged an armed hold-up of a Melbourne suburban bank four days after the break-out, Ryan telling bank staff and customers that the rifl e he was brandishing had already killed a man. Several days later, the body of an associate was discovered in a Middle Park toilet, shot by Walker, who apparently believed he and Ryan were about to be betrayed to police. There was widespread and genuine fear in the Melbourne community when the escapees were at large: parents kept their teenage children at home from parties, cinema attendances dropped off and calls reporting putative sightings of Ryan and Walker were hitting the police switchboard at the rate of one every 10 minutes. People feared they would encounter the fugitives in their backyards, armed and dangerous. While the escapees were at large, they were the most wanted men in Australia, and they came to be regarded as feared bogeymen and the embodiment of criminal evil. Ryan and Walker avoided recapture for 17 days during which this intense community anxiety continued and saturation media coverage of the police manhunt ensued. A cabinet minister in the Victorian Government, John Rossiter, was later to describe the period when Ryan and Walker were at large as "a reign of terror" in which the "veneer of law and order in the . . . community is not very thick". It can scarcely be said that the enduring nature of public interest in the Ryan case has been animated by residual belief in Ryan's innocence. His defence counsel, Philip Opas, QC, now in his 90th year, steadfastly maintains that Ryan was not guilty of the murder that saw him go to the scaffold. Opas became convinced of Ryan's innocence because of discrepancies in the witness evidence. Most opponents of the hanging accepted Ryan's guilt, as I do, but argue that capital punishment has no place in a civilised society, and that Ryan was, in any event, an inappropriate candidate for the gallows. Ryan was a recidivist offender and he did have grandiose fantasies of becoming Australia's leading criminal, but there were redeeming features in his make-up and he showed promise of better. For my book, I interviewed former Pentridge prison governor Ian Grindlay about Ryan. He had stood next to Ryan on the gallows, so close he could have reached out and touched him as he stood on the edge of doom. He had got to know Ryan well when he was serving a term of imprisonment in the 1960s at the Bendigo Training Prison when Grindlay had been governor there. Grindlay expressed a high regard for Ryan. "By the way you're talking," I asked, "Ryan sounds like a model prisoner?" "No, not a model prisoner," Grindlay replied. "In my 30 years in the prison service, Ryan was the model prisoner." Ryan confessed his guilt to Grindlay the night before the hanging, saying that he had fired to prevent Hodson capturing Walker: "I did shoot him. But I didn't mean to kill him . . . only to stop him," Ryan said. Grindlay was deeply affected by the execution and his health suffered badly because of it. A devout Catholic, he would say a prayer for Ryan every day of his life until his own death in 1984. Mike Richards is author of The Hanged Man: The Life and Death of Ronald Ryan (Melbourne, Scribe, 2002), which won the Ned Kelly Prize
in 2002, and was runner-up in the National Biography Award in 2003.
Mrs Tosh HFG
|
|||
armybguide |
|||
|
An acquaintance of mine was a Prison Warder in Melbourne's Pentridge Jail at the time Ryan escaped,"shooting" a Warder in the process and he told
me categorically that Ryan was innocent. He believes to this day that another warder shot his mate accidentally and that from where Ryan jumped the fence it
was impossible to make the shot. A lot of evidence was covered up in this case, because Bolte wanted to hang Ryan come what may.
Having said that I believe the current system where priveleges and do gooders ensure comforts and rights for the low lifes in prisons does not deal with the wrongs of what they have done. We accept Bali bombers being shot and say justice is served but we would have locked them up for life then let them do a University Degree which we pay for. There is no deterrent in our current legal system to make a Martin Bryant, Ivan Milat or Julien Knight think twice about murder.
Ken Pyke
GTR-AUS 118 Ulyssses 35827 1998 Kawasaki GTR 1000 Green 2008 Kawasaki GTR 1400 Black "Le Noir" Lives Dimboola Vic Works Telfer WA |
|||
MrsTosh |
|||
|
Interesting what you say about Bolte wanting to hang Ryan. When George Bush was Governor of Texes he let a man die. New evidence was brought to light
about his innocence and they requested a Governors parden. George Bush let him die.
The University Degree thing gets to me. I was THIS close to doing a History degree with Macquarie Uni, but life and (especially) $$ were against me. That's life and God has other plans for me. Dunno what yet? I love history, but have a passion for telecommunciations that just won't leave me no matter what I do. Mrs Tosh HFG
|
|||
Typhoon 90 |
|||
|
They're criminals. Put them in a 6x6 cell, serve them meals in the cells. Let them out one at a time 30 mins a day. Would cut costs down a lot and
eliminate this criminal interaction on the gaols that breeds super criminals and gangs.
Don't like it? Don't kill people..........I say don't execute them, but let them go insane if they have a life sentence. If they mutilate/kill themselves, so what? They have been locked up because society has determined they shouldn't be allowed the privelidges and freedom we all enjoy, the privelidges and freedom they have taken away from others, but they end up better off than a fair percentage of the population.
The answer is to lock Civil Libertarians up with the criminals they are trying to protect. Let these whining do gooders see what they are protecting, I bet they'd all change their opinoins pretty quick. Regards, Andrew.
"Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted
by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."
|
|||
MrsTosh |
|||
Mrs Tosh HFG
|
|||