IT has been interesting this week to see the reaction to the issue of whether there should be automatic prison sentences for people who attack emergency service workers with many in the comments saying yes.

There were several well argued points put forward, and one which bafflingly suggested that courts should exist only to decide the sentence, and not to determine guilt or innocence.

That point of view was especially worrying, that people feel we should effectively hold show trials in these cases.

The idea of an automatic prison sentence for anyone who attacks a police officer or paramedic is like something from a dictatorship.

We live in a society where everyone has the right to a free and fair trial, whatever they are accused of doing, no matter how heinous, and the idea of an automatic prison sentence for any offence is madness.

My question to the people who say we should have automatic prison terms for those who attack emergency workers is: how exactly would that work? And then, how exactly is that offender rehabilitated and brought back into society?

The other question is what exactly constitutes an attack? Any system with rules as vague as this risks being abused by those with unscrupulous motives.

On top of this, what guarantee is there that automatically jailing anyone who attacks a police officer would serve as a deterrent?

We should be careful with knee-jerk, emotional reactions to things we do not like.

No police officer deserves to be attacked while performing their public duty, and we should be tough on the people who commit these offences, but we must not lose sight of why our legal system is the way it is.

If our legal system means anything, we need to have free and fair trials for everyone, and not just impose a straight to jail sentence on someone.

As soon as we do that, we move towards being a police state, where the police can effectively jail anyone they do not like.

That sounds ridiculous, but we are on a slippery slope as soon as we allow any public body to circumvent the established legal system, even if the intentions of that body are pure.

We have a flawed legal system, that much is true, but we have a fair one, and that must not change.