Rape-aXe: Female condoms with ‘teeth’ to fight rape

How’s this for punishing (and helping convict) rapists?

The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man’s penis during penetration, Ehlers said.

Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it — a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.

“It hurts, he cannot pee and walk when it’s on,” she said. “If he tries to remove it, it will clasp even tighter… however, it doesn’t break the skin, and there’s no danger of fluid exposure.”

- CNN

Think:

Is justice served? Will this reduce rape? Opponents argue that it will worsen the situation when a victim is subjected to gang rape, as the other men will be incensed by the harm caused to the first rapist. What are your views? Does this problem mean we should abandon this invention?

Golden Balls: Prisoner’s dilemma in a gameshow

To convict criminals, you need evidence. Sometimes, the evidence comes in the form of testimonies or information from suspects themselves.

When this happens, one may see a case of ‘Prisoner’s dilemma’.

In its classical form, the prisoner’s dilemma (“PD”) is presented as follows:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

- wikipedia.org

Here’s how prisoner’s dilemma may work out, brilliantly exemplified by British gameshow, ‘Golden Balls’:

 

Question:

How might the prisoner’s dilemma affect the fairness of punishments meted out by our criminal justice system?

Australian quadriplegic granted right to starve to death

In Australia, it is legal for patients  to refuse life-saving treatment; assisisted suicide, however,  ”is a crime that can carry a life prison sentence”.

That puts this case in the grey area of the law, and raises several questions:

Will this set the precedence for other cases? Does it matter? Is there a loophole in the law that needs fixing?

Then again, the law on assisted suicide differs across the world. Given that these laws differ, a person could, in theory, move to a country that does not criminalise assisted suicide in order to fulfil their desire to die.

Question:

“When the crimminality of an act is subjective, there can be no moral argument made against the crime.” Discuss.

Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.

Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on multiple — and powerful — psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.

- New York Times

Question:

How far do you agree that our system of dealing with youth crime is flawed?

Comprehension practice: Paradox

Under a plan to reduce the state juvenile inmate population, many youths who once would have been held by the state are now detained by the Los Angeles County juvenile detention system. Los Angeles County is also under a federal mandate to improve psychiatric services for juvenile inmates, especially at the six camps at its Challenger Memorial Youth Center, which holds most of the county’s medium- and high-risk offenders and most of its mentally ill ones.

“We were told that the Challenger camps are, paradoxically, the only camps at which staff are authorized to carry O.C. spray,” wrote federal civil rights investigators in a 2008 report to county authorities, referring to oleoresin capsicum, known as pepper spray. “One supervisor told us that he believed that allowing staff to carry and use O.C. spray made sense given the ‘mental health population.’ ”

- New York Times

“We were told that the Challenger camps are, paradoxically, the only camps at which staff are authorized to carry O.C. spray,”

Explain the paradox in the above statement.

[See this post on how to answer questions on paradox]

No trousers for women in Sudan?

Lubna Ahmed Hussein is being charged for wearing ‘indecent’ clothing – in the form of a pair of trousers. If sound guilty, she could face 40 strokes of the cane under Sudanese law.

Of course, it’s common knowledge that wearing trousers is far from being deemed crimminal acts in other countries.

Which raises the question: what makes a crime a crime? Given that crime is subjective, how should states determine what constitutes a crime?

Tudung issue revisited?

A full-time National Serviceman was sentenced on five days’ detention on Friday under the SAF Act for conduct prejudicial to good discipline. His trespass: a refusal to cut his hair or consume SAF food because he was a practicing Brahmin priest. Read the whole article here from CNA.

Does this reaction from the SAF contravene any human rights articles you know of? Should the bureaucratic rationalization of ‘uniformity’–used so fervently in the 2002 Tudung issue–apply here?

(Thanks to Derek for this piece)

Executing the mentally retarded

In the US, it is illegal to execute a prisoner who has an IQ lower than 70 – clearly, we acknowledge that a low IQ is a mitigating factor in a crime.

But what if the prisoner had an IQ that was lower than 70 when he commited the crime, but, after the mental stimulation received from constant interaction with lawyers while undergoing intense preparation for the trial, his IQ hits the 70-point threshold? Is it fair to execute him? After all, it is no longer illegal…

[For more information on the case, see Atkins vs. Virginia]

The ‘unfathomable’ arrest of a black scholar

 [...] the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s most prominent African-American scholars, has stirred outrage and debate.

Jelani Cobb, an author and professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, says it’s troubling on many levels when “one of the most recognizable African-Americans in the country can be arrested in his own home and have to justify being in his own home.”

-

‘Why, because I’m a black man in America?’

- Gates, in response to being arrested by a police officer in his own home

-

‘You’re not responding because I’m a black man, and you’re a white officer.’”

- Gates

 

 [Full article here]

Question:

Comprehension: Punctuation

Why is the word ‘unfathomable’ in the title in inverted commas?

It’s only criminal if it’s against your religion.

Beer-drinking Singaporean model faces caning in Malaysia

Malaysia, which has large Indian and Chinese minorities freely enjoying alcohol, has a two-track legal system. Civil courts operate alongside state-based sharia courts, which can try Muslims for religious offences.

- Channel News Asia

New technologies exonerate convicts, including some on death row

According to the Innocence Project, DNA has already exonerated 218 U.S. convicts. Sixteen of them had been sent to death row. The evidence of their innocence was under our noses all along. We just didn’t see it or use it.

- William Saletan, Live and Learn, 2008

[full article here]

Which raises the question: in light of the possibility of mistakes in convictions, should the death penalty continue to be used?