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

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.

No system can be perfect, but with a little common sense, and a
presumption to always err on the side of caution, it can be made to
work. That's why we have human judges and juries, and not sentencing
by (say) computer.

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.

No no, I'm talking about entirely seperate "acts" - in different places
or different timeframes. Even if someone planted a bomb that killed 50
people, from the death penalty POV it'd still be one act - the bomb
itself. If they then went on to shoot or stab someone somewhere else
(and left enough evidence in both cases for completely sound
convictions), that would be a different act.

The objective is not to start hanging people left right and centre, but
only to do so for clear, serial offences.