To think that the jo yeats jury should have been told about his strangling during sex fetish?

[pippala]

pleased for Joanna's family that he has been found quilty, their ordeal is hardly over though.
Min 20 years, so he will be 53 when he comes out, with still half his life left.
Now it appears he watch porn that involved strangulation, had sex with prostitutes and like choking them!
I have heard about better orgasms when you can't breath, Isn't that how Mike Hutchence died?
I can not understand why this was withheld from the jury.
I was on jury service and put away a pedo for 33years. at sentancing we were told he had done it before to 3 other girls! I can understand that we were not to know as we were hearing only that case but in Tabaks case he hadn't killed before,as far as we know but his personality was not the one portrayed by the defence.

thunuderbolts That is the only conclusion that can be reached here. Too often blame is laid at the judge's door, and occasionally that is justified. Hence why we have courts of appeal. But more often the issue is with the law, and our recourse should be to the law.

And what else is the law other than the rules that Parliament makes. And what is Parliament other than the MPs we elect. So, really, if the law is wrong, then we have the power to change it.

The implication of that was made, Milly, but I can't be bothered to search back through 100+ posts to find it now.

The child porn thing was not aimed at you, it was just in the same post.

Just as a matter of interest Eurochick, what type of evidence is this? Maybe that's the key point here that the legal system has singled out particular types of evidence as being particularly controversial, when the correct approach would be to allow evidence so the whole picture of what happened is revealed.

'You should not be allowed to tell lies in your defence, and if you do, the prosecution should be allowed to introduce e idence to show that you are lying.'

I think this is how it works in the US (at least new york)

For example, the prosecution cannot bring in evidence that someone is a drug addict, but if part of the defence is that the person has never used drugs then they have 'opened the door' and the evidence can be used.

Yes, euro, that is what the judge ruled.

He then allowed the defence to tell lies about Tabak's monogamous relationship, the prosecution asked that evidence that he saw prostitutes be admitted based on this line of defence, but the judge refused.

I can see why he excluded the evidence for being prejudicial, it was. I can't see why he continued to exclude it when the defence relied on assertions directly contradicted by that evidence.

It seems that in trying to make himself safe from an appeal he was incentivised to allow Tabak to walk on a murder charge, knowing he could give him a longish sentence for manslaughter.

What Eurochick says rings true...same vague recollection. Given the nature of this case I suspect the Judge played it absolutely by the book.

Actually Tidy it matters a great deal that a man's use of violent murderous pornography is not allowed in a trial where he is charged with murdering a woman using the same method that he masturbates to in pornography.

This was a hate crime. A racist who had committed an attack against somebody from an ethnic minority wouldn't be able to hide their use of racist hate material in their trial, so why should a woman-hater be able to hide his violent misogynistic interests.

We need to know if the judge was wrong or if the law was wrong, in order that we can ensure this doesn't happen again.

I am sure I have heard that the watching of bomb making videos etc has been used as evidence against defendants.

How is this different?

Yes it does seem more about the judge's ego in not wanting the verdict of the trial he presided over to be appealed.

Slubadub- You are totally missing my point (and I do understand the basic principles of 100 innocent men, etc, etc. It has been 10 years, but I have studied criminal law).

My point was not about motivation or sexual kicks. My point was that Tabak claimed that the strangulation was an accident, that he didn't intend to do what he did. To me, an interest in strangulation is relevant to that. If someone said "I put X amount of rat poison into her food. I thought it would just make her vomit a bit" (it's been a while, I'm assuming that is below the threshold for serious harm). If that person was known to have an interest (or professional knowledge) of rat poison, it's relevant to how believable that story is that there was no intent.

I didn't say I struggled to reconcile the defence with pornographic viewing choices. I said I struggled to understand how detailed knowledge on a topic wasn't relevant to a defence which argued that the an accident occurred.

Though given how easily you misunderstood me, perhaps the point is that the judge decided that the risk of mixing up intent and motive outweighed the relevance.

There's not much you can do with a bomb though other than errr blow people up. Pornography can be argued to have a purely personal use which explosives don't. Personally I think the evidence should have been admitted as it shows what a liar Tabak is - but I'm not a lawyer or a judge and the result in this case is what I was hoping we would see anyway.

YANBU

Do you know what is completely weird about this whole thing, apart from all the obvious things, is that somehow it's served to normalise strangulation pornography, as if any harmless guy could be watching it, no big deal, who are we to judge.

Wanting to see women strangled and choked is pure sadism. Whether someone goes on to commit murder or not is immaterial. It's wrong at every level, and the men who use it need to be judge most severely and socially ostracised if necessary. Certainly there is no way this sort of behaviour should be seen as somehow acceptable, like the judge saying "well it wasn't a snuff movie".

Not in this case it doesn't, since the conviction appears to be safer without this being submitted. You're talking about the wider sense, I'm referring to this case in light of the verdict.

If the judge was wrong, which I don't believe to correct (specifically WRT Tabak), then the law that needs to be looked into. I would entirely support that for clarification purposes, as it does seem that there is some confusion even amongst those legally educated.

The thread has diversified though tbh, and people are trying to answer different things now. It would be better for this subject to be debated independant from the Tabak case.

Lots of people have read the Anarchist's cookbook etc for entertainment purposes, Northern Lurker. I knew people who got into trouble for doing so as teenagers. They never had any intention of blowing anybody up.

Looking at bomb making videos is not the same as making them though is it?
Like looking at rape pornography is not the same as raping someone?
Or strangling porn is not the same as doing it?

What is the difference?

Why is one permissable and not the other?

That I actually agree with thunder.

I do know someone who is heavily into rape fantasy (not in a dominant sense, I mean chasing down a woman and violently overpowering her).

I don't believe him to be violent and I don't know wtf that fantasy came from, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to sleep with him, IYGWIM.

No I think it's better to keep the discussion grounded in reality Tidy. In other words this case is a demonstration of the perverseness of the law (although the judge's justifications were pretty perverse - stupidly claiming that women being strangled and choked in porn were only acting) that manages to allow an argument that someone's interest in strangulation pornography if revealed would not allow a fair trial in the case of a man who has strangled a woman to death.

Apologies if I misunderstood you, Secondtime, not my intention at all (and I'm certainly not motivated to do so either - sorry, couldn't resist).

To be honest, without a full transcript of the trial, we could be here forever second guessing what the prosecution, defence and judge did and didn't do and say wrt this evidence. I completely get the fury of Tabak's temerity in putting forward the defence he did, and of his lawyers seeking to withhold certain bits of evidence from the jury. Referencing another poster, unfortunately these sorts of trials do end up looking like games, perhaps because the stakes are so high on all sides. I just think it's important to point out that it's not always the judges who get it wrong. In fact, they tend to have a pretty good hit rate on these things, relatively speaking, and the UK has one of the world's finest legal systems (going by my limited comparative legal studies, also 10+ years ago!)

And your post is exactly why clarification is necessary. The diversity of thinking on this subject shows that the law is unclear and subject to different interpretations. The judge did the right thing IMO. And it is just an opinion, as is yours. I would like to see this debated objectively, without an emotive case at the heart of it, because if you really think about, this is about much more than just porn, it involves multiple instances in which a person's interested may or may not be relevant to their crimes, despite said interests not being a crime in and of themselves.

Slubadub - Ha ha. Fair enough, sorry if I was a bit chippy. It's been a long day.

It's all just so bloody depressing isn't it.

interested interests

If anyone is interested in an account of the difference between motive and intent in a case of sexual strangling, you may wish to consider reading "Thrones, Dominations" by DLSayers and JPaton Walsh as the plot hinges on it (yes, set decades ago and fiction, but the underlying points are valid).

The other thread linked a couple of accounts of what had been made public about the inadmissible evidence. As it's not a complete account of the legal argumentation, then one cannot draw firm conclusions, but taking what was said there with general points about inadmissibility, I think the salient point would be that watching violent porn demonstrated his pattern about his viewing behaviour only not a pattern of previous action. If there had also been evidence of assaults on previous partners or prostitutes, then a different conclusion on admissibility might/might have been reached.

SheCutOffTheirTails - you make a good point. But I suppose that paying for sex does not however demonstrate competence with women. And without evidence that he harmed any prostitutes or behaved with them in a way that foreshadowed this attack, that point alone would not have advanced the prosecution.

I completely agree with the posters who say this was a sound decision as it reduces the scope for an appeal.

hear hear swc