Remember the guy who Broke the vases??

Sequoia said:
But an "accident" is not the same thing as recklessness. If you do something which you do, or should have, known was likely to lead to such damage, then it's reckless and if it's reckless then it's criminal damage. But, as I said, the big issue is the definition of recklessness. What degree of foresight of likely consequences means you, or an objective reasonable bystander, should have foreseen those consequences? That argument has been going on for decades, right up to and into the House of Lords.
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Quite right, the maxim actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea and the notion that a conviction should be dependant on proving the state of mind of the individual defendant. The reasonable man's test was when Caldwell (Lord Diplock decision was in force), the reasonable man is sober and prudent, suffers no mental incapacity, does not lack foresight associated with youth. Now days, the state of mind of the defendant has to be prove instead. Each case would be different and base on its own merrit.
 
Gilly said:
Hmmm. Hope they have some evidence that it was intentional.
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Presumably they do, or at least they have grounds for suspecting that he was unnecessarily reckless, or they wouldn't have bothered arresting him.
 
Raymond Lin said:
Quite right, the maxim actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea and the notion that a conviction should be dependant on proving the state of mind of the individual defendant. The reasonable man's test was when Caldwell (Lord Diplock decision was in force), the reasonable man is sober and prudent, suffers no mental incapacity, does not lack foresight associated with youth. Now days, the state of mind of the defendant has to be prove instead. Each case would be different and base on its own merrit.
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I'm fairly sure that this doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
 
If they were so bloody valuable, why were they stored in a position where they could be knocked over and smashed in the first place????
 
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Arcade Fire said:
I'm fairly sure that this doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
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subjective - state of mind of the defendant

objective - reasonable man

The law on recklessness started with subjective, then went onto objective after R v Caldwell, and now back with Subjective in 2003 with R v G.
 
Heofz said:
If they were so bloody valuable, why were they stored in a position where they could be knocked over and smashed in the first place????
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Because the ethos of many regional museums is to try to provide the public with as full a level of access to treasures as is possible. That means trying to portray them in the kind of environment in which they would originally have been portrayed ..... which is why they were where they were ..... and without any uneccessary artificial barriers.

Also, if you want to protect items like this, you'd have to do something like putting them behind glass or perspex security screens, and then you can't enjoy them because the mere fact you're looking through glass detracts from the original qualities.

The point is, they are viewed as works of art that are there to be seen and enjoyed, despite the fact that they are rare and valuable, not that they are rare and valuable objects that need to be protected at any cost, despite that they happen to be works of art. After all, the logical extension of the protection-first philosoophy is to lock them is a vault away from public access altogether. Then they couldn't get damaged ..... but they couldn't be enjoyed by large numbers of people either.

If musems took value and security as their prime concern, we'd all be culturally worse off for it.

If these vases were damaged as a result of an accident, so be it. That's the risk this ethos runs. But if it was deliberate intent or recklessness that damaged them, the individual concerned needs to be held accountable for his actions.
 
Sequoia said:
If musems took value and security as their prime concern, we'd all be culturally worse off for it.
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surely its not as black & white as that though? i would have thought just a compromise (i.e. red-rope-perimeter around it?) Though I have no idea how it was stored in the first place, perhaps that *was* how it was kept :confused:
 
All this "Why were they not stored away elsewhere" etc argument.
These vases had been in the same place for over 60 years and nobody had ever come close to knocking them over before.

They wouldn't have arrested the guy if there wasn't some kind of evidence to show that he was at fault and it wasn't such an accident as he claims.
Yet for some reason most people are automatically assuming this guy will be found innocent and that the police should be doing better things...
So okay, the guy is innocent until proven guilty - the way it should be.
But all this automatic assumption that the police are simply making more owrk for themselves...to knock over vases that have been in a location for 60 years does look a little suspicious, certainly in my eyes.
 
Heofz said:
surely its not as black & white as that though? i would have thought just a compromise (i.e. red-rope-perimeter around it?) Though I have no idea how it was stored in the first place, perhaps that *was* how it was kept :confused:
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But given that he apparently tripped on his shoelace and tumbled down the stairs to land on these vases, how would a red rope have stopped him?

(The vases, incidentally, were sitting on a low-level windowsill. No rope.)
 
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