In message .com, at
03:30:17 on Thu, 21 Sep 2006, Pyromancer
remarked:
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.

It might under some ideal system that you have in your head, but how do
you know that a similar issue that you hadn't predicted would arise in a
few years time? The way law and sentencing works is largely reaction to
unexpected things happening in real life, rather than what the
legislators were able to predict.

To be executed in the system I'm proposing, someone would have had to
be convicted, beyond all reasonable doubt, of two seperate "acts".

In this case, one act is killing the mother, and the other act is
killing the child. The argument which has arisen is that it doesn't
matter whether the child was in the mother's arms, or womb, at the time.

--
Roland Perry