Summary
A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.
The crazy thing about minority report is that nobody, least of all the people who made it, seem to have understood the problem that the movie depicted:
Having the ability to predict attempted killings and interfere with them would be a genuinely good thing! The problem was the notion that everybody who is predicted to commit such a crime gets an extreme punishment without even a trial, consideration of the circumstances, or any of the other things we would normally attempt to do if we learned about someone attempting to commit a crime. Equating premediated murder out of greed with an over-reacting in a highly surprising situation, with self-defense, with pretty much just accidents and punishing them all in the most cruel way you can imagine is what was so idiotic about the movie that it was hard to take seriously. Trials are there for a reason, and that reason isn’t just to figure out what happened physically!