English fo MP student book

UNIT 2 – Crime and Punishment

57% of women fear going out at night aloneOnly a small percentage of victims of outdoor

1.A policeman on duty defends a victim and kills the criminal. What is he guilty of?

2.Do you agree with the death penalty? Why (not)? If you do, under what circumstances?

3.Imagine that you discover that your best friend has found a way of cheating in an important exam which the two of you are taking soon. What would you do and why? Mention any personal experience you may have had.

4.Should police officers carry guns? Why (not)?

What reasons can you give for choosing punishments? Select the three that seem most important to you. Justify your choice(s).

-to make the punishment fit the crime;

-to teach them a lesson;

-to make them pay for their crimes;

-to give them a second chance;

-to deter others;

-to allow opportunity for rehabilitation;

-to ease the burden on tax payers;

-to set an example.

45

English for Modern Policing

Read about the court sentences in the text and think of a crime to fit each one.

If it is someone’s first offence, and the crime is a small one, even a guilty person is often unconditionally discharged. He or she is set free without punishment.

The next step up the ladder is a conditional discharge. This means that the guilty person is set free but if he or she commits another crime within a stated time, the first crime will be taken into account. He or she may also be put on probation, which means that regular meetings with a social worker must take place.

A very common form of punishment for minor offences is a fine, which means that the guilty person is sentenced to a certain number of hours of community service.

Wherever possible, magistrates and judges try not to imprison people. This costs the state money, the country’s prisons are already overcrowded and prisons have a reputation for being “schools for crime”. Even people who are sent to prison do not usually serve the whole time to which they were sentenced. They get “remission” of their sentence for “good behaviour”.

There is no death penalty in Britain, except for treason. It was abolished for all other offences in 1969. Although public opinion polls often show a majority in favour of its return, a majority of MPs has always been against it. For murderers, there is an obligatory life sentence. However “life” does not normally mean life. A parole system operates to give prisoners, even convicted murderers under certain circumstances, an opportunity to be released "earlier".

¾ Activity 15

Work with a partner and discuss the following questions:

1.What purpose do prisons fulfill in current society? What purpose should they fulfill? Comment on the points in the list below.

2.What kinds of problems do prisoners face, both while they are in jail and after they are released?

3.Why are people sometimes tempted to take the law into their own hands? Are there any circumstances in which this is justifiable?

Write a short essayabout 200 wordson punishment.

Try to use the following words and phrases:

depression, humiliation, fear of violence from guards or other inmates, contact with more experienced and hardened criminals, drug abuse, ostracism, stigma attached to it, slip back into his old ways, finding housing and employment, the law has failed them, a code of honour, a blood feud, a vendetta, to take revenge on somebody

¾ Activity 17 Appropriate Sentences

Read the accounts of nine cases. The sentences have been left out. What do you think the sentence should have been? Choose from the following:

46

UNIT 2 – Crime and Punishment

12years

1)SAN FERNANDO, Jan. 14 - A 16-year-old boy convicted of murdering two other teen-agers on a La Crescenta playground over about $660 worth of marijuana was sentenced today to……...

2)A former Immokalee man who has been in prison since 1996 pleaded no contest Monday to shooting and killing another Immokalee man. Willie Barrett could have faced the death penalty if convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of Henry Jean "Baby Ruth" Marshall on Dec. 22, 1995. Instead, Collier County Circuit Judge Lauren Miller formally found him guilty of a reduced charge of second-degree murder and sentenced him to …….

3)A former baby sitter was sentenced to ………. for causing the death of a toddler in her care. Tawny Sue Gunter had pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for causing 2-year-old Billy Deon Blankenship to fall over the side of a staircase Nov. 15, 1990, at her Concordia, Mo., residence. Last Nov. 15, Gunter admitted grabbing Billy in a burst of anger and causing his fall.

4)A former police officer who admitted killing his wife was sentenced in Rockland County Court yesterday to …………. after appeals from his daughter for leniency and from his former mother-in-law that he be jailed longer.

5)Thursday, September 06, 2001 OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. – The city's new district attorney is pressing ahead with state murder charges against bombing conspirator Terry Nichols

–and is seeking…... – despite Nichols' federal conviction and the high cost of prosecuting him.

6)Shooting spree leader gets ……….Three bored Athens teen-agers with idle time, a car and a hunting rifle spent a weekend last February shooting up empty schools, cars, and occupied homes for kicks.

7)A man who did cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis in a nursery school in Edinburgh, was sent to prison for…………... John Curran was arrested by police after a successful operation was mounted. The drugs recovered had an estimated street value of £220.000.

8)An all-white jury in Oklahoma City yesterday convicted a Negro, aged 22, of raping a white employee of a telephone company. They sentenced him to ……..………. after the prosecution said that 500 years would be just a “slap on his wrist”.

9)A Glasgow housebreaker is now serving ……….. after an intensive police investigation put him behind bars. Following a series of break-ins, the “Operation Magpie” squad carefully analysed each crime and established a pattern, suggesting the same person was responsible. The painstaking investigation led to a Glasgow criminal called David Kelly. He was arrested and charged with a total of 33 break-ins across Edinburgh.

Read the following newspaper stories. The class will be divided into 2 groups, one will be the prosecution and one will be the counsel for the defence. Elect three representatives in each team. After preparation, each representative will talk to his/her counterpart, in turn. Decide on the appropriate punishment for the offenders in each case; prepare to make demands, plead, justify, negotiate.

47

English for Modern Policing

A B C

Listen to the following report on drink-driving and fill in the blanks in the table below with a number, word or short phrase

What are the punishments for such offences in your country?

Reading Activity

CRIMINALS

This is the story of a serial killer called ‘Son of Sam’.

•What is a serial killer? Have you heard of any?

•What do you expect to find out about serial killers after reading this text?

Read the text. Some sentences have been removed. Decide where they should go. Look at the underlined vocabulary items and look up any unknown words.

Son of Sam

PART ONE

….a)… Two young women, Donna Lauria, and her friend Jody Valenti, were talking in Jody's car in the Bronx, New York City. A man pulled out a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog handgun from a paper bag, squatted down and fired into the car five times. Donna died immediately, hit in

48

UNIT 2 – Crime and Punishment

the neck. Jody, shot in the thigh, leaned on the horn while the man continued to pull the trigger, even though the chamber was now empty.

On the night of October 23, 1976, three months after the Lauria girl’s senseless murder, twenty-year-old Carl Denaro was shot five times in the head. A little more than a month later, on the evening of November 26, 1976, Donna DeMasi and her friend Joanne Lomino were fired at and barely survived.

Of these three assaults which had occurred in two different areas, the Bronx and Queens, only one bullet had been recovered intact. Consequently, police were not yet able to link these attacks to a single individual.

Things quietened down for two months. Then in the early hours of January 30, 1977, the killer went hunting for his next victim. Christine Freund and her finance John Diel left The Wine Gallery in Queens around 12:10 A.M. and strolled towards his car. As they sat in the car, two shots broke the night, shattering the windshield. Christine grabbed her head; both shots had struck her. John rested her head on the driver's seat and ran for help, trying to flag down passing cars, but to no avail. People in nearby homes had heard the shots and had called the police. A few hours later Christine died in hospital.

Forty-three-year-old Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey and Captain Joe Borrelli started to work on this latest homicide. Coffey could see that the bullets used to kill her were not typical. …b)…Investigating further, he discovered that her murder matched those other assaults on Donna Lauria, Donna LaMasi and Joanne Lomino.

Coffey had a hunch that they were dealing with one psycho using a .44, stalking women in various parts of the city. As his investigation began to bear fruit, a homicide task force was formed under Captain Borrelli. After probing into the backgrounds of the murders and their victims, police were unable to find any suspect on record; ….c)…It was beginning to look as though a psycho had randomly targeted attractive young women for assassination.

•When did the police realise that the attacks belonged to the same individual?

•What information can the type of the bullet provide?

•Why is the background of a murderer important in solving a crime

PART TWO

On the evening of Tuesday, March 8, 1977, an attractive young Barnard College honor student named Virginia Voskerichian was shot in the face and died immediately.

The next day, the police had a match on the bullet. It had come from the same gun that had killed Donna Lauria. The following day, the police commissioner held a press conference to announce to the City of New York that they had linked the various shootings. …d)….

As expected, the phantom reappeared. On April 17, 1977, Valentina Suriani, and Alexander Esau. Valentina was shot twice. She died immediately and Alexander a bit later at the hospital. This psycho who would keep on killing until he could be found among the millions of men who fitted his description.

But -- this time there was something different: the killer's letter left at the scene of the murders addressed to Captain Borrelli. The letter did not have any useful fingerprints and the envelope had been handled by so many people that if there were any of the murderer's prints, they were lost…. e)…..

49

English for Modern Policing

Operation Omega was growing in size and resources. It had expanded to some two hundred detectives. Catching the perpetrator of six murderous assaults would mean tremendous awards for the detectives involved -- and they knew it. It was an extra incentive to put in long hours to catch this nut. Such long hours, however, brought frayed nerves.

The Omega task force was flooded with calls. Everyone, it seemed, knew the killer: …f)….Every one of these thousands of leads had to be checked out and disqualified -- a huge chore for any task force.

While the police were chasing down every suspect, checking registrations for .44 weapons, tracing activities of former mental patients and generally running themselves ragged, the Son of Sam had become emboldened by the publicity. He decided to write to a reporter for the Daily News.

Partial fingerprints were salvaged from the letter, which were of no value in finding the suspect, but would be valuable to match against a suspect once captured.

Donna Lauria, Son of Sam’s first victim, had been murdered on July 29, 1976. Considering the Son of Sam’s letter, police were worried about an anniversary killing.

…g)… The Omega task force was desperate. How to protect a whole city of young women from a random killer? Detective Coffey even considered placing cops in bullet-proof cars with mannequins to try to lure the killer. …h)…Tensions built steadily until July 29 and nerves were at a breaking point all that day and night, but no Son of Sam. Not that day. Two days later when the police were beginning to feel relieved that the anniversary had passed without another murder, the Son of Sam took his last victims.

In the early morning of Sunday, July 31, 1977, a pretty young woman named Stacy Moskowitz and her handsome young boyfriend Bobby Violante were shot. He barely survived. She didn’t.

•Why is it important for the press to know the development of the case?

•What is the impact of hunting a dangerous criminal on detectives’ lives?

•Why are fingerprints important?

•Why did the police expect the killer to strike again on July 29?

PART THREE

A Sam Carr remembered then the odd guy, David Berkowitz, who had briefly rented a room in their house in early 1976. "He never came back for his two-hundred dollar security deposit when he left. Well, he was always bothered by our dog, too."

On August 3, 1977, the two Yonkers cops, Chamberlain and Intervallo, proceeded cautiously and queried the state computer network about Berkowitz. The computer gave a brief profile of him from his driver's licence. Berkowitz appeared to be approximately the same age, height and build as the Son of Sam, as described by various witnesses.

In the meantime, things seemed to be popping all over. Officer Chamberlain of the Yonkers PD responded to a call about a suspected arson at Berkowitz's apartment house at 35 Pine Street.

That same afternoon, Sam Carr, upset over the shooting of his dog and what he saw as nonaction by the police, independently pursued the matter with the Omega Task Force…. i)…

50

UNIT 2 – Crime and Punishment

The day of Berkowitz's arrest, Sergeant Joseph Coffey was called in to interview him. Calmly and candidly, David told him about each of the shootings. When the interview was over there was no doubt that Berkowitz was the Son of Sam. The details that he supplied about each assault were bits of information that only the killer would know.

….j)….

While David did not start his life under the most auspicious circumstances, he grew up in a middle-class family with doting adoptive parents who showered him with gifts and attention. His real mother had arranged for his adoption even before David was born on June 1, 1953.

Perhaps the most significant factor in his life was that he was a loner. His parents weren't particularly socially oriented and neither was David. He was always big for his age and always felt different and less attractive than his peers. His neighbors remember him as a nice-looking boy but with a violent streak, a bully who assaulted neighborhood kids for no apparent reason. He was devastated when his foster mother died of breast cancer in the fall of 1967. His faith in God was shaken. He began to imagine that her death was a part of some plan to destroy him.

David joined the Army in the summer of 1971 and stayed there for three years. He was an excellent marksman, particularly proficient with rifles. Anger and frustration with women, coupled by a bizarre fantasy life, started him down the road to violence when he got out of the Army in 1974. Even before the murders began, David had set some 1,488 fires in the city of New York and kept a diary of each one. He was acting out a control fantasy. Robert Ressler in his book Whoever Fights Monsters explains: " …k)… With the simple act of lighting matches, they control events in society that are not normally controlled; they orchestrate the fire, the screaming arrival and deployment of the fire trucks and fire fighters, the gathering crowds, the destruction of property and sometimes of people."

His former tenants’ German shepherd was a noisy dog and howled frequently. The neighborhood dogs howled back. In David's diseased mind demons lived within the dogs and their howling was the way they ordered David to go hunting for blood - the blood of pretty young women.

David's apartment on Pine Street also had its dogs: Sam Carr's black Labrador, which he shot with a gun.

Sam Carr, in David's elaborate delusion, was the host of a powerful demon named Sam. When David called himself the Son of Sam, it was the demon living in Sam Carr to which he referred. David was classified by the defense psychiatrists as a paranoid schizophrenic…. l)….This story is repeated time after time in every city experiencing the attacks of a serial killer. The demands of the citizens to know what is happening is balanced against the reality that feeding these demands for information virtually ensures that the killer will keep on killing. Legitimate police work is seriously hampered by a deluge of bogus tips from well-meaning citizens. The only party that benefits from this common problem is the media.

•What personal information can be found in a state computer network?

•What kind of information “would only the killer know”?

•Why did the killer adopt the name “Son of Sam”?

•Do you agree with the punishment he received?

•How can the media benefit from such a problem?

51

English for Modern Policing

Here are the sentences you must put into the correct places

1.The list of suspects was endless.

2.The fact was, despite the subsequent excuses, Sam Carr had just handed them the name of the killer and they sat on it.

3.They had come from a powerful, large caliber gun.

4.When Son of Sam first struck on the morning of July 29, 1976, no one could expect that a serial killer was making his debut.

5.He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 365 years in jail.

6.Who was David Berkowitz anyway and how did he become the Son of Sam?

7.The commissioner stated that the only description of the murderer was that of "a white male, twenty-five to thirty years old, six feet tall, medium build, with dark hair."

8.This letter was leaked to the press in early June and the world finally heard the name, "Son of Sam."

9.Most arsonists like the feeling that they are responsible for the excitement and violence of a fire.

10.….nor could they find any common thread that linked the victims to one another or a third party.

11.It was a waiting game

12.The newspapers made absolutely certain that the entire city expected another killing on or around that day.

¾ Activity 20

Find words and phrases in the text which mean:

crouched, meaningless, hardly, happened, walked slowly, unsuccessfully, guess, without method, became larger, extraordinary, tiring task, ex , encouraged, saved, weird, shortly, questioned, went on, little pieces, favourable, people of the same age, hindered, false

¾ Activity 21

Match the words and phrases to make common word combinations.

52

UNIT 2 – Crime and Punishment

¾ Activity 22

Complete these sentences using the word associations from the exercise above. You will have to make some changes to fit the grammar of the sentences.

1.She … three times in the last two years and because she … no one is willing to give her a job.

2.You must realise that you … when you park on the pavement.

3.He is … in cold blood and then … ever since.

4.The police … and he will remain in custody until his behaviour improves.

5.The man who … is suspected of having received stolen goods.

6.He … when he was 19 and he … in a high security prison ever since.

7.She … although she claims she got it as a gift.

¾ Activity 23

How good are you at detective work? The following conversation includes many slang words.

Match the words to their definitions.

AHave you heard about Brian?

BNo. What?

AHe’s been nicked.

BYou’re joking. What happened?

AHe was blagging a bank with his brother and somebody grassed on them.

BWho’s the nark?

AWho knows? Brian’s got a lot of enemies.

BWhat did he get?

ANine years.

BNine years inside! I thought you said he had a good brief.

AWell, he thought he did.

BWhere’s he going to do it?

ADartmoor.

BOh, no. The screws in there are the worst in the world.

ASo, what have you got for me?

BTop quality gold rings. Fifty of them.

AAre they hot?

BWhat do you think? Would I come to a fence like you with them if they weren’t?

ALeave them with me tonight and I’ll give you a price for them in the morning.

BLeave it out. Do I look like a mug? I’m surprised at you, trying a scam like that. I wasn’t born yesterday. I want a price now.

ASorry, worth a try!

53

English for Modern Policing

8

9

1 0

1 1

1 2

B

Across:

1.getting money from people by threatening to publicise facts they do not want revealed

2.going through a ceremony of marriage when you are still married to someone else

3.betraying your country to a foreign power

4.saying something which damages someone’s character

5.acting in such a way as to make someone believe he or she will be hurt

6.setting fire to a building

7.taking goods illegally into or out of a country

8.making an illegal copy of a banknote or document

9.stealing, taking property which belongs to someone else

10.getting money from people by using threats

11.offering money corruptly to get someone to do something to help you

12.killing someone illegally and intentionally

Down:

A-B killing someone unintentionally or in mitigating circumstances

54