‘Crime’ & Punishment [updated]

It doesn’t happen often, but I’m with Psycho Milt.  There’s something wrong when helping out immigrants in return for some free tiling, and then lying about it, gets two sentences amounting to six years in total – but killing another motorist because they’ve scratched your BMW gets you just three.

There’s something wrong when those sentences for this ‘crime’ are made cumulative, when the sentences for the “human waste” who killed Karen Aim and tried to kill Zara Schofield was made concurrent, “thereby letting him off for the attempted murder and making it clear to the victim of that attempted murder exactly what the judge in that case thought she was worth: nothing.”

The message here is that taking someone’s life, or trying to, is some way down the scale of “bad things to to do in New Zealand” from a political crime – from taking some limited advantage of your position and then trying to conceal it.

Help for some immigrants in return for some free tiling -- and lies about it – these things are "...intolerable in our society and threaten the institution at the foundation of democracy and justice."  But kill people, or try to, and that’s not so bad.  That’s the message from Justice Hansen and his colleagues on the bench.

Frankly, Field has already had whatever punishment he might have actually deserved in his fall from grace and the public shaming he’s experienced.  Frankly, locking Phillip Field up for six years looks nothing like making the punishment fit the crime -- it’s more like making the punishment fit the politics.

This is not justice; it’s retribution.

Field’s real crime is that he fell out of favour with the ruling party just as they were falling out of power.  Because if taking advantage of your position and then trying to conceal it in the manner that Field did was genuinely intolerable and a threat to our institutions, then surely the collar of Bill English would be being felt about now.