cuts to Customs<\/a>\u00a0and said it showed the government’s priorities were all wrong.<\/p>\n“On a day when the government are trying to talk tough about crime, they’re rolling out the welcome mat to organised crime, and there is an inescapable link between organised crime and violent offending in New Zealand,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said Three Strikes was not good policy, and there was no evidence it would reduce violent offending, but “it’s difficult to critique an announcement of an announcement”.<\/p>\n
“I’m very sceptical about mandatory minimums generally. If you look around the world … where they are imposed they generally lead to unjust and inequitable outcomes.<\/p>\n
“I think when Parliament starts telling judges how to rule, then actually we start to break down some pretty basic, important constitutional principles.”<\/p>\n
In a statement, Labour’s justice spokesperson Duncan Webb said Three Strikes had “little evidential backing” and the government was reviving it “just to look tough”.<\/p>\n
“This is political posturing of the worst kind,” he said. “There was almost no evidence to show it deters offending, and instead it resulted in severe distortions in sentencing third strike offenders.”<\/p>\n
He pointed to a case where a person was jailed for 10 years, when the judge had said 18 months would ordinarily have been imposed, and another case where someone was jailed for seven years for patting a prison guard’s bottom.<\/p>\n
“That was unjust and can still occur under this new proposal. Repeated offending is already an aggravating factor. Judges can already impose sentences of this length, where appropriate. All this law does is continue the government’s attack on the judiciary by removing sentencing discretion.<\/p>\n
The Green Party’s Justice spokesperson Tamatha Paul said it was an unwelcome return to a “failed American-style approach to justice” that would lead to “grossly unfair results that disproportionately impact M\u0101ori”.<\/p>\n
“It is shameful that New Zealand has one of the highest imprisonment rates in the developed world. This is despite mounting evidence that mass incarceration has failed to bring down rates of crime, keep communities safe, or rehabilitate those in our system.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The opposition has laid into the government’s plan to reintroduce a “three strikes” regime, saying it is inequitable and there is very little evidence it works. The government says the new policy will apply only to sentences of at least two years, give judges more discretion in cases where harsh outcomes would be “manifestly unjust”, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":9618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9619,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9617\/revisions\/9619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}