Murdered teen's mum ... 'farcical' sentence

It’s become a ritual. Desperately aggrieved, bereaved, shocked, enraged, relatives and friends attend in the courtroom, equipped with Victim Impact Statements which they have worked out over the weeks of the trial, full of purple prose -- and with photos and mementos, complete with teddy bears.

The media lovingly report the juicier bits of these statements, the ferocity of the delivery, the eyeballing of the accused, and the visible reactions, if any, of the accused. Judges seem to have become astonishingly tolerant of all this. Sometimes, but very rarely, one of these statements might speak of understanding and forgiveness, of decisions to avoid bitterness and hatred, rancour and revenge.

Then inevitably, the sentence imposed turns out to be less than the eternity of torture they believe appropriate, so they convene outside the courtroom and say how disgusted, or “gutted”, they are, how they have lost faith in the justice system (why would anyone think that an intelligent assessment?), and what they would do to the offender if they had access.

Of course these people are feeling desperate and helpless, powerless. But the country’s justice system can’t save them from the facts of life. Life includes tragic events. The world is a perilous place. Living is dangerous. There is grief and loss, and huge injustice all the time.

Typically the victim’s families say, as in a case this week, “So eleven and a half years was all my daughter’s life was worth…” Well, lady, that’s not what anyone thinks, not the judge, not the counsel, not the jury. The victim’s life is incalculable. The judge dares to believe that the offender’s life is worth something too. So do most of us in our better moments.

Then, behold, it turns out that the victim’s family have suddenly become experts on criminology and penology. The silly media start to hang on to their every word as they prescribe what they think should now happen in law, in police action, in prison administration, in parole guidelines.

A lot of this has been gathered up in a lobby called the Sensible Sentencing Trust, whose representatives are wheeled out every time there is the slightest public perception that some judge has “got it wrong”. The head guru in sensible sentencing is Garth McVicar. Garth sees the world in black and white.

“Sensible” sentences are apparently those governed by the central rubric of these people, that “The punishment should fit the crime.” So what they really think, although they rarely say so, is that we should reinstate capital punishment, and possibly also corporal punishment. “An eye for an eye…” They never seem to grasp that (a) the bible does not teach an eye for an eye; or that (b) another name for it is the Law of the Jungle.

In a civilized society, accused people are protected from the rage and revenge of others. Justice, to be just, does have to include a solid component of wisdom and mercy -- otherwise we are back in the jungle, subject to the law of the lynch mob. We have judges precisely so that we are protected from people such as Garth.

And all of this is without venturing into the question whether our prisons are doing any good anyway. Obviously some people have to be detained, perhaps for life. Otherwise our prisons seem to be simply assembly belts of crime.

(Postscript: It costs five times more to keep a convicted youth offender in prison in the UK, than it would cost to keep him at Eton. Eton might work better.)