Heather du Plessis Allan: We need more cops on the beat

Man alive. There is a family in Dunedin doing it tough today. I mean, these guys sent their 16-year-old boy to school yesterday and he didn't come home. He was stabbed at a notoriously dangerous bus stop by a 13-year-old. What the hell, by the way, as a 13-year-old doing with a knife? 

Now, that stabbing at the bus stop will have sent chills through parents up and down this country. Because the thing is: that is not just a Dunedin problem, it’s an every part of the country problem. And we have for a few years now been warning that kids are beating each other up at bus stops at places like Rotorua, Tauranga, New Lynn, Pukekohe, Albany, Dunedin....And now the worst thing that could possibly happen has happened.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Stonewalling the cops should be a crime

It’s time that we stop making excuses for why we can’t make it a crime to stonewall the cops.

And instead just do the right thing and make it a crime for every adult in the house to stonewall the cops if someone has bashed a baby to death.

This is becoming a pattern with child deaths in New Zealand. Just off the top of my head, I can give you four cases where babies have been bashed and the adults didn’t want to tell on each other:

Ron Smith: Terrorism, Murder, and Madness

Is James Holmes, the perpetrator of the Aurora (Denver) massacre, insane?  He has certainly been working hard at his arraignment to create that impression, with much eye-rolling and empty stares.  Is the man responsible for the Oslo killings of twelve months ago (Anders Breivic), insane?  He has been insisting that he is not.  Moreover, the families of his victims are also clear that he is not insane because they do not wish him to avoid punishment.  Both men committed mass murder but is there a plausible explanation for their behaviour, in either case, that might make it something other than madness?

The legal test for insanity in the Anglo-Saxon tradition is much as it was when first promulgated in 1843, in relation to the case of Daniel McNaughton, the so-called, ‘McNaughton Rules’.  To be acquitted by reason of insanity, a defendant needs to clearly prove that, at the time of committing the act, he was labouring under such ‘defect of reason’ as not to appreciate its ‘nature and quality’.  He did not know what he was doing, or if he did know, he did not know it was wrong.