Implementing a Law Change !

Activists are on the streets trying to stop the release from prison of a notorious paedophile with a long history of sex crimes against children.  In 1996  Michael Guider faced sixty sex charges and was put away for a long time, and in 2002 another extension was added for the manslaughter of a child.

That was the disappearance of nine year old Bondi schoolgirl  Samantha Knight in 1986.  Samantha  simply vanished during the walk from her school to home and this sparked a long police investigation.  Her picture was widely distributed but the search ran cold and it was years later that Michael Guider was arrested and confessed that he had abducted Samantha - and that she had died in his hands.  He claimed this was an accident and he was sufficiently convincing for the police to reduce the charge to manslaughter.

Guider has consistently refused to divulge where and how he disposed of her body.  This refusal has  been the cause of parole being refused, but now the end of his sentence is coming due and soon he will walk out the gates of his prison as a free man, and many fear he will return to his paedophile activities.

Activists are calling for a law change to make release conditional on the information of body disposal being divulged. Samantha Knights mother and her now adult school friends would be heartened to give her a headstone to mark her final resting place and this is impossible because the man who abducted her maintains his silence.

This will probably be resisted by those who contend that a prisoner must only legally serve the time handed down by a judge but surely there is another form of punishment for consistent sex offences against young children that should be at a judges disposal.   That is the application of the surgeons knife to perform castration.

In some rare instances judges have been known to order chemical castration, but this can be reversed.  That surgeons knife is final and it would seem a very fair tradeoff for eventual freedom with the sure knowledge that the released would not reoffend.  In fact, agreeing to the surgeons knife should be the only option for consistent sex offenders with a long string of convictions to their name.

This refusal to divulge the disposal of a body does not only relate to sex crimes.  It is quite common in murder cases and it would seem a very reasonable sentencing option for the incarceration to be indefinite until the body disposal information is revealed and the body discovered.

The law seems squeamish in putting castration on the law books, but it may even be welcomed by offenders who find their bodies sending controlling urges that they are unable to control.   The law needs to change to embrace twenty-first century options rather than to simply stick to the rules that prevailed in earlier times.