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?

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.”

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

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

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‘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?