Money and Justice

Property developer David Henderson has said that he is willing to donate a few thousand dollars to a drugs charity to show he is sorry presumably in exchange for getting out of his drug conviction without a conviction. For those of us with less money it sounds a little ridiculous.

I understand David Henderson is worth about 20 million. His offering of a few thousand is rather like the average New Zealander offering to pay a dollar or so in order to reduce their sentence - that wouldn’t stop me from jaywalking let alone taking a drug if I was addicted. I suggest if the payment is supposed to represent how sorry David is then it should be somewhere in the millions of dollars.

So how would that work in practice? Well I tentatively propose that the court system can engage in a sort of negotiation with the criminal to ensure that they charged the criminal a sufficient enough of money to provide a significant deterrent...