Legal lottery?

Today a man was jailed for four years for the manslaughter of a man his partner accused of jumping a queue in a Sainsbury’s supermarket near Wimbledon, south London. The woman called up Tony Virasami after another shopper accused her of pushing into the queue, but instead of confronting that man, he punched an innocent bystander, Kevin Tripp, in the face, causing him to collapse and die. The woman got eighteen months.

Last week, Jake Fahri, a yob in south-east London got life for murder for throwing a cooking pot at a youth in a bakery. The pot broke, and a fragment cut the victim’s throat, causing him to bleed to death. He will have to serve at least fourteen years. The judge told him that the court accepted that he did not intend to kill his victim.

Both attackers were criminals – Virasami was tagged and under curfew for shoplifting (tagged means having an electronic tracking device round his ankle) while his partner had form for deception and handling stolen goods; Jake Fahri had four previous convictions, including two for robbery, one of them armed. The law does stipulate that killing with intent to cause grievous bodily harm is murder, and both attacks were provoked by the men who killed. So why has one man got life, and another – much older – man got four years?