Justice matters, and it costs
Last Friday some of the tabloids led with a story whingeing about the money that was spent on the defence of the men convicted of manslaughter in the case of PC Andrew Harper, who...
Category: Crime
Mandatory life sentences for manslaughter?
A few days ago I got a link on my social media to a story about a campaign for the law to be changed so that there would be a mandatory life sentence for...
Not our brothers’ keepers
Last week a young woman named Ellie Williams (right) from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, posted a long message on Facebook describing having been kidnapped by a group of local Pakistani men and taken to an address...
Imprisoned by his disability?
Today a blind man in the UK who has been convicted of sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl some years ago in Cheshire was sentenced to seven years behind bars and told he could not...
Why this isn’t rape
Yesterday a teacher in Havant, Hampshire (a small town near the south coast of England) was jailed for 12 years for engaging in sexual relations with four girl pupils, ranging in age from 13...
Restorative justice is no substitute for prison
Recently I came across a long thread (starting here) arguing against ‘carceral’ (prison-based) responses to serious crimes and, in particular, rape. The argument is that the justice system serves the state’s purpose, which is...
Is it really so difficult to track down this rapist?
Earlier this week there was a story in the Daily Mail, among other places, about an autistic woman who contracted HIV while living in a care home in north-west London some time between 2006...
No injustice
In 2011 Sally Challen was jailed for life for murdering her husband, Richard Challen, at his home (and formerly their marital home) in Claygate, Surrey (which is down the road from where I live)....
Should this racist thug be behind bars?
A 29-year-old man who attacked a young boy because he thought he had bumped into his child’s buggy while running for a bus received a suspended sentence (twelve months, suspended for two years) at...
Want justice? Tell us your whole life story first
Yesterday it was reported that the police in some parts of the UK, notably London and Merseyside, demand that women reporting rape submit both medical records and an extraordinary array of electronic data to...
Karanbir Cheema case: intention matters
Last week an inquest opened on the case of a 13-year-old boy with a severe allergy to dairy products who died in a London school playground after allegedly having cheese put down his shirt....
Who gets believed?
Recently a lot of people have been retweeting a tweet by one Amanda Brown Lierman, “political & Organizing Director for @theDemocrats” (not sure if she means the whole party or a local branch of...
Why don’t they call it rape?
Yesterday some of the papers reported that, according to a report by the charity Save the Children, child migrants mostly from sub-Saharan Africa were “being sexually exploited” or in earlier versions “selling sex” in...
The mystery of Ruth Wilson
Recently a half-hour film featuring Martin Bright, the former New Statesman, Spectator and Jewish Chronicle contributor, and a retired Northern Irish cop named Liam McAuley, was published on YouTube about the disappearance of a...
The men alive because we can’t hang them
The past two weeks it was separately announced that one serial rapist who preyed on women in London was to be released after serving nearly ten years and another, who attacked women and girls...
A 20-year-old is not a baby!
Yesterday a young man called Rashan Charles was killed in an encounter with the police in London, and the footage has been posted on social media with the hashtag “Justice for Rash”. The footage...
On Ian Brady and the death penalty
Last week Ian Brady, a serial murderer of children from the 1960s, died in a “special hospital” (a high-security hospital which takes criminals who are mentally ill) aged 79. He had been convicted of...
On the problem of proving hate
Yesterday I saw a post on the Disability Hate Crime Network group on Facebook about a crime in which a ‘vulnerable’ man was kept captive and tortured for more than a week by a...
Foreign criminal scum!
The Sun are OUTRAGED this morning because an “American strangler”, as they call him, has been deported from the USA to this country after serving nearly 40 years in a New York state prison...
Citizenship is not just a visa
Today three members of the notorious ‘grooming gangs’ who raped and sexually abused girls in the Rochdale area lost an appeal against deportation to Pakistan. Two of the men, who were jailed in 2012,...