Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 00:13:31 on Thu,
21 Sep 2006, Pyromancer remarked:

Which is one reason to only execute serial offenders (and even
then only those who commit the worst types of crime).

You still get edge cases. In the USA some states automatically execute
murderers on the second offence. Unfortunately, this collides with a
separate recent ruling that unborn children count, so someone murdering
a pregnant woman (even if he was unaware of the pregnancy) is in danger
of getting his "two strikes" in one go.

I think, given the object is to prevent executing someone who's
innocent, then that would still only count as "one act of murder", even
if it killed more than one person. To be executed in the system I'm
proposing, someone would have had to be convicted, beyond all
reasonable doubt, of two seperate "acts". No doubt some of the Daily
Wail congingent would claim that's too lax, but with something which
really is unreversible, better to err on the side of caution, just in
case.

The USA has peculiar religious concepts driving some of it's social
ideas, including a resurgance of the old idea that a child's life is
worth more than a mother's, which is leading to campaigners demanding
that all women of child-bearing age must at all times refrain from
drinking, action sports, or anything else that might conceivably in any
way harm any child they might happen to conceive. Women who's babies
have been stillborn have been dragged off to jail if they are drug
users and it's though the drug use has harmed the baby.