Wednesday, June 1, 2011

The Prophet Motive

THE WORLD must look a little different from the bench, perhaps not so firm and hard and fast as it seems to your garden-variety citizen, the innocent sort who brings to the courts a belief that justice is rational, consistent, never swayed by race or creed. Judge Margaret Rizkalla of Victoria’s County Court is aware that the workings of the legal mind can be a mystery to the common folk, especially where sentencing is concerned, and she has gone to the trouble of explaining the imponderables she must wrestle when giving bad people what’s good for them.

“Sentencing is one of the most complex tasks a judge undertakes because it requires balancing a number of complex factors, both personal to the offender and particular to the offence, in order to provide a just and appropriate sentence, whilst at the same time providing justice to the offender. It isn’t a mathematical equation – in the final analysis it does require the individual judge to make a subjective assessment of all the relevant factors and to determine how they will be applied in fixing a sentence. It is never easy.”

Rizkalla must have put a good deal of thought into deciding the appropriate punishment for Damien Tektonopoulos, who masqueraded as a masseur and rubbed 14 women the wrong way. In 2007 Rizkala sent him away for ten years, with a minimum of eight to be served. It is impossible to feel sympathy for such a nasty piece of work, but his decade in a cage does raise an eyebrow after the judge’s latest “subjective assessment”, which saw Almahde Ahmad Atagore imprisoned for a series of very similar assaults. In the Libyan student’s case, however, the sentence was a mere five years, with his release anticipated in 2013. If  Tektonopoulos feels hard done by after copping twice the time for essentially the same crime he needs to understand that Atagore had an excuse, at least as Rizkalla sees things. Being a Muslim, the way Australian women dress and behave could only inflame Atagore’s lusts. 

“It seems you were very ill prepared to deal with cultural differences,” the judge told him. It is too late for Tektonopoulos to shrink his stretch by embracing the Prophet’s creed, but if the courts were to review Atagore’s sentence, perhaps with a view to adding a few years, it might make our homegrown perv a little happier to know that judges, some judges, really are opposed to discrimination based on race and religion.

8 comments:

  1. PhillipGeorge(c)2011June 1, 2011 at 12:19 PM

    Surely Professor, it can't be discrimination if a Judge does it? Surely Damien must have known he was being bad and the good Muslim must have thought he was being seduced; these are just apriori considerations! There are only White racists by definition; and only Whites have sufficient insight to be culturally accountable and morally responsible.
    Martin Amis:
    “People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.”
    Masochist meets sadist, or enabler meets narcissistic sociopath?
    It's the genocidal bit that concerns me Prof; for it stands as a comprehensive one word expose of the cultural intent codified in your nearest Koran. A Bible and a Koran are mutually exclusive documents.
    What have Freemasons done?

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  2. I recall a case of a Tunisian Muslim butcher who murdered both the grandparents of a young granddaughter who lived with them and for whom they were resposible, because they objected to her going out with a far older man of a different culture. When it came to try to deport him, the Federal Court determined that it would be too harsh on the Tunisian because "he had been provoked and was most unlikely to commit a similar crime". I could never work out whether it was just the killing or the "double" killing that he would not repeat, and thus saved him..

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  3. Oh wow, I very much suspect that Judge Margaret Rizkalla would probably exonerate terrorists by claiming that cultural differences caused them to want to kill innocent women and children too. Fantastic! She wins a one way trip to an Alice Springs township on a Saturday night!

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  4. "Atagore was shocked by the cultural differences and felt isolated and depressed, particularly as he did not have a mosque nearby, said County Court Judge Margaret Rizkalla."

    He couldn't find a mosque so he molested a 13 year old girl, ummmmm.....

    But more seriously, it sounds like the Judge accepted "I was horny" as an excuse, or "I was a horny muslim" in this case, which is an entirely different thing altogether, apparently.

    Feminists? @..... @.... @...

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  5. We need Sharia law for Muslims living in Australia.

    If Muslims were subject to their own laws in Australia, this Libyan student would have suffered the death penalty.

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  6. Actually, Anon, he wouldn't have. There wouldn't have been 4 witnesses who were upstanding muslim men to confirm what the victims said.

    The victims are, after all, only so much uncovered meat.

    nb.today's verification word: deado

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  7. Not to worry Prof - he will certainly be shunted back to the old country when released from prison. I work in the part of DIAC that handles these cases and unless things change very dramatically between now and then, he doesn't tick any of the boxes for staying on.

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  8. What Nilk said is correct, anonymous, feel this Judge has made an error, she has over looked the "victims" in favour of the accused, something quite a few judges seem to do these days.

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