Thanks to Nick Cowen of the Civitas Blog, I have just been reading another of those man facing prosecution for defending himself stories:
A shopkeeper could be charged with murder after an armed robber who tried to steal the day’s takings was stabbed with his own knife during a struggle.
Tony Singh, 34, described as a hard-working family man who often works 13-hour days, was ambushed as he shut his shop on Sunday evening by Liam Kilroe, 25, a career criminal who was armed with a knife.
Mr Singh fought back and, after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, Kilroe was seen by witnesses to stagger away clutching the knife to his chest. Kilroe was taken to hospital, where he died, and Mr Singh was detained by police. He is now waiting to discover whether he will be charged, and is on police bail until February 29 pending further inquiries.
Lancashire police confirmed that papers had been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, which will decide whether Mr Singh should be charged with one of three offences: murder, manslaughter or assault.
Mr Singh, who suffered injuries to his neck and back during the struggle and had to be treated in hospital, insisted yesterday that he had acted in self-defence. …
I suppose the authorities have to consider the possibility that Mr Singh may have done something wrong despite all appearances to the contrary, but in this case they appear, unless this report is way off the mark, to have no evidence of any such thing. It could be that the police routinely hand over all the evidence in such cases to the CPS, no matter how heroically the shopkeeper behaved and no matter how completely the villain got what he deserved and how completely the heroic shopkeeper did the rest of us a favour by, as it turned out in this case, killing him. And whereas in theory there could be a prosecution, the chances of one actually materialising are very remote. In which case this is a story about lousy journalism.
But, as Nick Cowen points out, what the shopkeeper appears to have done is what the criminal justice system failed to do. He punished an already arrested and many times previously convicted career criminal, who should have been in jail already but who was actually roaming the streets trying to commit more robberies. The justice system should have stopped that, having already had every chance to do so. Tony Singh’s heroism showed up what a lousy job it was doing.
The phrase “taking the law into their own hands” is often used by the authorities in circumstances like these. But by the look of it, Tony Singh didn’t so much take the law as catch it and save it from being smashed, after the authorities had themselves dropped it. And you can’t help suspecting that, in the eyes of the authorities, this was the real crime here. Why couldn’t he just have handed over the money like a sensible chap?
Exactly. If people start getting the idea they can use force to resist some toad trying to take their property, next thing you know, they might start thinking the same thing about state appointed thieves. They might even start wondering why Britain’s police are a whole lot more heavily armed than in ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ days and yet they’re now defenceless.
Yes, a scared, defenseless and unarmed populace are easier to handle by the State.
Isn’t it interesting that when some regimes, like in Serbia and Sudan, effectively tell their security forces not to intervene when some thugs they support attack certain people, or even help by attacking the victims for defending themselves, it is a violation of human rights; while when it happens over here it is just ‘enlightened policing’ and avoiding people taking ‘the law in their own hands’?
The government is right to charge Mr. Singh. The governments true, and real function is to grow it self, ever larger. Now that Mr. Kilroe is dead, who will generate crimes, feral children by multiple women? Think of all the police, clerks, welfare, housing staff that have their jobs threatened? They depend upon the scum like Kilroe to lay their government golden eggs. Less crime, less jobs. What are these people supposed to do?
Yes, Mr. Sing has done his worst. He has removed a fine, young productive member of the welfare state( England’s largest industry ). And, for that, he must be punished. Taxpayers getting ideas that they are running the show, must be nipped in the bud. Otherwise the whole foundation of the modern welfare state could collapse, producing anarchy in government agencies
“”taking the law into their own hands”
At one time, there was a contract,we gave up our rights to self protection and retribution,in exchange the state would do these things for us.Now the state has broken the covenant,offering nothing in return except to protect its monopoly on crime and punishment.
Just another closed shop provider.
Doubtless if they can’t get Mr Singh (and it should be Mr Singh, GC) for murder, they’ll get him for something.
Having the impudence to ignore the ‘advice’ of the public sector to lie down and invite them to sodomise you.
Littering, perhaps.
Brian wrote, on the front page:
You’re not going to like my response.
I don’t often tell people to step up when it’s “merely” a property crime. Property can be replaced, and most victims of property crimes are, I suspect, unable to effectively act anyway. The ones who are able to put up a proper fight without an illegal escalation[1] will generally not listen to me and I’m glad they don’t. The first priority is always the preservation of innocent life but the guy who’s been studying Krav Maga for years is probably able to see to his own safety quite well.[2]
That being said, street criminals seem to get more and more feral every decade. This could be one of those instances where Singh complied with the robber’s demands and the shithead tried to stick him anyway. Obviously, that’s more than a “mere property crime” and the only crime here is that Singh had to wrestle instead of putting a few Gold Dots through Kilroe’s ten-ring.
As for the Can’t-Prosecute-Squat: Every homicide in my area, even those where everybody knows it to be fully justified at the beginning, is referred to our equivalent for review. In some states it’s automatically presented to a grand jury, but we don’t use them in Colorado all that much. If this weren’t the land of Tony Martin that we’re discussing, I’d say “Move along, nothing to see here.”
[1]In my state, one may use force but not deadly force to protect property. If the thief escalates to threatening a person, obviously he opens a whole new door, as a deadly force assault fully justifies deadly force in response.
[2] So that we’re perfectly clear: I don’t believe that the victim of crime is morally equivalent to the aggressor. From a personal moral and ethical position I don’t have any problem with Singh simply shooting Kilroe right in the freaking face at the start of the encounter, and then billing Kilroe’s next of kin for the cleaning bill. My concern is practical: relatively few genuine good guys are worth a damn in a close-quarters fight and I don’t want them to get hurt.
I just re-read the posted article.
I withdraw my first paragraph above. Singh should have shot Kilroe in the fucking face and been done with it. The empty shirts and strokes in Westminster who prevented him from doing so are the only criminals left alive in this case.
(Advocating shooting people in the face is one hell of a way to talk when I’ve got church in an hour or so. Wow.)
What’s your point?:-)
Ron,
I quite disagree: we gave up our rights to retribution, but not self-protection.
It bothers me, too, to see the phrase “taking the law into their own hands” misused by applying it to a self-defense situation. But it think it’s for a somewhat different reason than you or Brian. Rather, a law which prohibits self-defense at the moment of exigency is no law at all, and deserves our contempt, not our support
“(Advocating shooting people in the face is one hell of a way to talk when I’ve got church in an hour or so. Wow.)”
Get over it. You not, in fact, “advocating shooting people in the face”. It’s not that simple and if you’re thinking about it that simply then you deserve all your ethical dissonance and I don’t feel sorry for you. Get your mind clear: you’re advocating the destruction of predators. This is a good thing.
Get it straight and keep it straight.
It could be that the police routinely hand over all the evidence in such cases to the CPS
A person died, it’s not the Police’s job to decide if it was justified or not. There will be a police recommendation attached to the file which the CPS will review.
I’m prepared to bet this will be a NFA result. This did used to be done by the police though, but I can believe with all the other changes and assorted crickbats the police come in for they’d be more than happy to dump this stuff on other people.
“I quite disagree: we gave up our rights to retribution, but not self-protection.”
We are effectively disarmed,the doctrine of appropriate force makes no sense whatsoever.If you want to stop an assailant,you have to put them down.What you do will be measured afterwards in the cold light of day,by a police force which only wants to get a result and reach targets.
A police moreover,which has reneged on its protective duties and concentrates on its retributive function.
“Taking the law into their own hands”. Time was when “the law” was something everybody – not just the the police – had a duty to uphold, hence the concept of “citizens arrest”.
Meanwhile Mr Singh will have been photographed, fingerprinted and added to the DNA database. New Labour, New Danger.
I expect Mr Singh is utterly distraught by what happened (and what promises to happen) at the very least. Most people involved in this sort of event will be haunted for years at what happened, wondering if they had left the shop at another time, or had someone there to assist could they have averted this tragedy… there will be a thousand questions running through his mind for years.
Maybe even ruining his personal relationships, his desire to run a store or get close to people.
If Mr Singh is sent down for his act of self-defence, his life will be a nightmare among the scum in the jails who take it on themselves to add their own brand of “justice” at the killing one of their kind.
But then what would Kilroe’s feelings be if Mr Singh had died and not him – and carrying a knife presumably must have had some intent to use it – and what would be his reflections on the outcome?
That he “got away with it,” or was a little bit better off for a while?
We may never know, but it is a fair bet he really wouldn’t really think much about it at all and if he was caught (moderatly unlikely) he’d only be back with his mates inside for a short while.
And there is always another defenceless mug out there, ready for when he got out…
Yep, the world turned upside down because the perpetrators must be assisted to return to normal society. And Mr Singh put away for all our safety.
Daveon – I see your point. A bet you did not think I would ever type those words.
But this sort of thing has a “chilling effect” – the attitude of the powers that be undermines the habits of self defence and going to the aid of others on which civil society depends.
It is true that neither self defence or going to the aid of other people is banned in Britain – but there is a feeling that the powers-that-be do not exactly favour the honest person over the criminal.
Mr S. was attacked in his own car – he did not even use his own knife to defend himself. There was a struggle and the knife of the criminal found its home in the body of the criminal.
Of course questions should be asked – to make sure things were as Mr S. said they were. But the procedure is different from how it used to be – honest people are now treated with no presumption of innocence (yet they have one in theory – but not in practice).
Since the 1960’s there has been the growth of the idea that the thief is somehow a “victim of society”, “deprived” or “underprivileged” – not the working bits of shit that must thieves are.
Sunfish:
Christianity does indeed talk about turning the other cheek and so on.
However, as we lack the power to put back ears that have been cut off (or to raise ourselves from the dead), turning the other cheek to those who seek to plunder us is not a practical option for mere human beings (especially as many criminals are high on drugs – and will cut a person up even if he gives them everything they want).
However, as you were going to Church you could have avoided the use of the word “fucking” – I know I use the word as well, but there we go.
Saying “he should have shot him in the face” is enough, rather than “he should have shot him in the fucking face”.
So, due process doesn’t include doing an investigation into the death of someone? We’ll just say that as Mr Singh worked 13 hours a day that he’s obviously telling the truth and as the other guy was a thug, then it’s probably a good thing and let’s forget all about it.
I see nothing here that says other than that Mr Singh was attacked, and fought back in self-defence. But I haven’t checked on who the witnesses are, whether they have any relationships to either parties, cross-checked their statements, or seen any of the forensic results.
When someone is stabbed and dies, it is only right that an investigation should be carried out.
Let’s see what the CPS come back with.
There were no police in most of England till the 1850’s. A Justice of the Peace (unpaid of course) would appeal for aid from members of the public if he thought he needed it – for example to raise the “hue and cry” for a criminal.
Even as late as 1914 it was normal for subjects of the King to own and carry firearms (thought of as a basic right by those men who belonged to Constitutional Clubs and the British N.R.A. – and went off to die on the Western Front). Whereas the police were normally unarmed.
Even in London (a few years before the First World War) during one pursuit of armed robbers the police appealed for help to armed members of the public who happened to be walking by.
Times have changed.
Once again it cheers me up to read what samizdata commenters think.
What I do wonder though is why in self-defence, as in so many other things, there is such an enduring mismatch between what the public think is right and what our political class chose to impose on us?
Sorry to go OT but this is important.
The Illegal State(My title) :
“The British tax authorities have paid an informant for the bank details of scores of wealthy Britons. The records were stolen from one of the world’s most secretive tax havens.
HM Revenue & Customs paid £100,000 for data that it is using to launch investigations of up to 100 British citizens who have accounts at Liechtenstein’s biggest bank.
British authorities regard it as a coup to have penetrated accounts that have been beyond their reach for decades. “There will be many frightened people who thought Liechtenstein was secure,” said a City accountant.
Anyone found to have evaded tax faces fines of up to 100% of the money owed to the Revenue and, where deliberate deception is proved, a jail sentence of up to seven years.
Revenue men prise open princely tax haven
The bank informant has already provoked a storm in Germany by selling data on 750 wealthy Germans’ accounts to the country’s intelligence service for £3.2m in January last year.
Homes and offices of dozens of suspected tax evaders in Germany have since been raided. (…)”
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/money/tax/article3423610.ece
God damn! I cannot even express the disgust I feel after reading the story lucky posted. The state paid off a criminal to obtain stolen tax records from a sovereign nation, and they’re PROUD of it. How the hell do you survive across the pond? Incredible.
Paul, what is this ‘waterboarding’ I hear about? Is it a sport I should try out if visiting the US?.
If as some people have tried to tell me, it is a form of torture used by your authorities, how the hell do you survive? Why haven’t you fled to a decent country like Canada? Incredible- that you still imagine that your country is morally superior.
Two things. First, the heroic scum removal by Mr Singh should be rewarded some how. Perhaps one of our friend organizations in London could add an annual award presentation to the person who in the past year most heroically defended life and property, preferably with the wrong doer carried away in a hearse. We need some thing light and aery, indicative of freedom and independence. A bird maybe. Yes, that;s it! The Golden House Martin Awards! 😉
Second. I wonder if Lichtenstein could demand extradition of the wrong doer to Lichtenstein for trial and imprisonment. The guy is, after all, a criminal.
Additionally, Lichtenstein should ask for extradition of the certain members of Her Majesties Government for receiving stolen goods. They are afterall, good little EU Federal Statists, so they should have no problem with being sent to another EU country whose laws they broke. They are agents of the people who agreed to it aren’t they? 😉
Y’all are doomed. You know that, don’t you? Your only hope is to request immediate reassignment to the Wyoming office..
Well done, Mr. Singh.
I am advised that, should one be life-threateningly attacked, one should make quite sure that the attacker does not live to make his excuses.
Housebreakers qualify for the same.
Nick,
Waterboarding has it seems been used on a grand total of three people, all of them high-ranking al-Qaeda officials. This means that more journalists have been waterboarded as part of researching their stories than the medieval nutcakes who originally suffered the ordeal. Many members of the military are also waterboarded as part of their training.
So, a rough but effective means of interrogation? Undoubtedly.
Torture? Maybe. But in the context of a global conflict with giddy head-choppers I think a limited use is acceptable.
Paul, what is this ‘waterboarding’ I hear about? Is it a sport I should try out if visiting the US?
[shrug]
If that’s what your tastes run to, I expect most of the better BDSM clubs could hook you up.
And can you hook me up with some ‘Rendition’ clubs, so that I go to more exciting places than my luggage? Since I am not an American citizen, I would not even have any rights to claim!
The state paid off a criminal to obtain stolen tax records from a sovereign nation, and they’re PROUD of it.
Appalling, but the US does similar and worse things in its exercise of its purported extraterritorial jurisdiction. At least HMRC won’t bother you if you leave the country and stay abroad. Not the position for US citizens in relation to the IRS.
Dale – Lichtenstein, like many other European nations, is not an E.U. member (than God).
Other than that – agreed.
Paul and Chip:
Waterboarding – not the issue to me.
But the I.R.S. does similar stuff to the Inland Revenue.
Thank God – not than God.
Tim Almond.
As I said I agree that any violent death should be investigated.
But it is the STYLE AND MANNER of such investigations that has changed.
The presumption of innocence has, de facto, been ditched.
Another description I totally loathe. I realise that ‘Career Criminal’ is used by the media and courts to describe someone who is normally unable to fit into society in any way at all, but SURELY there must be a better way of phrasing it than that?
How about ‘Criminal misfit’ as a polite politcally correct term? Or (not so pc) ‘socially-inadequate loser’?
Or as the judge used to say at the start of every episode of “Porridge”, ” Norman Stanley Fletcher, you are an habitual criminal.”
What we seem to have today is much more than a sensible review to make sure that the story as Mr. Singh portrays it is right. If the supposed thief is dead, and therefore no final words on record, some small review would need to be made to determine Mr. Singh didn’t lure someone to their doom and make it look like a robbery. But that shouldn’t take too long, especially given the rap sheet of the dead man.
So what is the real nature of the step involved when it is not out of common sense but bureaucratic red tape? It moves from a sensible review to “if we condone this, then we are giving license to people to ‘take the law into their own hands’ “. This worry and concern exists mostly in a well advanced Statist mindset in that every individual action needs to be filtered through a State valuation of right and wrong. If we are soon to have carbon footprints wherein every behavior we exhibit is up for review, imagine then the attitude toward an act of self defense.
I don’t know if I’m making much sense, but basically it’s the notion that the State can’t see any place for the individual – it doesn’t compute. When every little action is up for review and interdiction, one can only assume that when something major happens it must demand a commensurate amount of red tape, review, and analysis, and in a case such as this this can only be justified by putting an innocent person under the hot lights of scrutiny and strip them of the right of presumed innocence.
If mowing your lawn or commuting to work is soon to be anti-social behavior, imagine what’s going to happen to you if defend yourself and your attacker ends up dead. At best there’s going to have to be thick, fat file on you before you’re let off the hook.
Yes, Brad, you are quite right.
We have reached the state normally ascribed to Germany. Anything that isn’t specifically permitted, is forbidden.
If they do prosecute Tony Singh, there isn’t a jury in the land who will convict him.
Stand by for further erosions of the principle of trial by jury. The State must have its pound of flesh.
(Oh, and Samizdata Admin – delete all this off-topic shite, whydontcha?)
Alisa:
That the Sermon on the Mount did not include “Blessed are they who shoot bad guys in the face,” unless you lump them into “blessed are the peacemakers” or “Blessed are they who thirst for justice.”
OTOH, he did also say “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one,” although I’m not sure how I feel about naked guys with swords running loose.
Paul:
Point taken about the language being, well, inappropriate. I get like that when I’m tired, and don’t always do such a great job of keeping my mouth shut.
Not knowing how such things are done over there, how have the investigations changed? It would be normal for us to collect fingerprints, if only to reconstruct who was holding which object and how they were holding it: relevant in a two-man knife fight with only one knife. I can see DNA swabs if there was a need to match a given blood pattern to one participant or another. And so on: any one of these items in isolation can have a perfectly reasonable explanation. I just don’t know how the pieces are put together over there.
A gross oversight, if you ask me.
LOL! I do have this tendency to visualize things which is hard to resist:-)
I heard it reported on the news that Mr Singh won’t be facing any charges. All well and good, but they’ll be keeping his fingerprints and DNA won’t they?
Sunfish –
– I do believe that the Colt Peacemaker is one of the better-known Colt guns …
I am delighted to report he will not be charged by the CPS
Alasdair:
Thank God. I thought he said “Blessed are the cheese-makers.[1]”
Brad,
Maybe and maybe not. Sometimes, shitheads like Kilroe are legitimately victims. Singh could hypothetically have stabbed Kilroe over an unrelated dispute and then claimed the robbery attempt took place. It’s highly unlikely, I’ll grant you, but it happens. After Kilroe’s death, the investigators had a sack of rotting meat that died at the hands of another person. The events that lead to Kilroe turning from a street thug to a reformed street thug needed to be reconstructed.
Sunfish’s Rules of Policing, Number Four: People lie to cops. Sometimes even when the truth would serve them better. As a result, claims of a legal justification for an act that would be illegal without it need to be investigated carefully, even when the guy claiming self-defense is a respected member of the community and the corpse is an ex-scumbag.
I’m delighted that Singh’s involvement with the legal system is over and relatively favorably for him too. Although I would certainly support him suing Kilroe’s estate for mental distress or something.
watcher in the dark:
Some people react as you say. Some people have it bad: I believe that’s called PTSD. And some people are off-balance for a few weeks and then back to more-or-less normal and some don’t have any real reaction at all. None of these responses is necessarily unhealthy. It all depends on how Singh or whoever handles it. That’s why emergency services agencies spend so much on EAPs and peer counselors.[2] Private citizens exposed to the same stressors should also seek the same sorts of help, at least once at the beginning, although I’d like to not see the f**ked-up-like-a-football-bat sort of counseling that one would get from the NHS.
[1] Surely just an allegory for all manufacturers of dairy products.
[2] A certain profession has a severe predisposition towards suicide. I’m convinced that over the last few years peer counseling has saved more cops’ lives than Kevlar.
No Further Action: The right result it seems after due process is taken. All is still well in the North West.
Sunfish: A colloary to your rules that my father (a cop) taught me. Never make statements to the police about anything at the time of an incident. Always say you’re in shock and ask to make a statement later. Policemen are good at pretending to be your friend even when they’re not.
He gave the advice about road accidents, but it would apply in spades if a death was involved.
Daveon,
I’m not going to call it a bad rule, but it’s a little limiting.
Picture this: You have two guys crawling in your window at 3AM. You tell them that they need to be on their way or you’ll “defend yourself appropriately” or whatever words you choose. They respond with a string of obscenities and keep coming. You open fire. One is then laying on your floor, not breathing. The other went back out the window.
When Goblin #2 took off, it’s utterly freaking critical that we find him. One, that’s a potential second dead body and most people object to letting people die whose lives might be saved, just on general principles. The other and IMHO more-important reason: wounded hoods are desperate, and the next window he crawls into, he’ll be looking for something rather more than a theft: hostages or some such.
Most departments in my area won’t ask for a statement the same night anyway: a good night’s sleep and letting the adrenaline wear off allows for much better (more accurate, more complete) detail. However, “There were two. The other was white, about your height, black sweatshirt, he jumped out the window and I think he ran back towards Main Street” would be, well, helpful in keeping anyone else from having an unfortunate midnight visit.
The founder of the first full time paid police force in London,Robert Peel stated “The only difference between a police officer and a member of the general public is that a police officer is paid to enforce full time those duties and obligations that are already incumbent on the citizen” So when somebody tells you that you cant take the law into your own hands they are wrong,its OUR law,and our right and duty to uphold it.