The justice system has proven time and again it doesn’t care about victims
“CRIMES reverberate through years and through lives,” the American writer Joyce Carol Oates once said.
“It is a rare homicide that destroys only one person.”
And crimes echo through lives because we have a justice system where the punishment almost never fits the crime.
James Yates, who supplied the handgun that killed 11-year-old Rhys Jones in 2007, walked free on Friday.
The Parole Board, who gets to play God in these matters, decided Yates should be set free because he is no longer a threat to society.
That is the law, as interpreted by the Parole Board.
BUT IS IT JUSTICE?
“Yates is a serial criminal and a nasty piece of work,” a source told The Sun.
“Although he didn’t pull the trigger, he set the wheels firmly in motion for Rhys’s death.
His release is devastating news.
How many chances does he get?”
During the murder trial, Yates was overheard saying: “All this fuss over a kid.”
This thug has had 11 years to contemplate the death of young Rhys Jones.
But the child’s heartbroken parents, Melanie and Stephen, have to think about it every day for the rest of their lives.
And that feels like the fatal flaw in our justice system.
It is too quick to give the wicked a second chance, a third chance, and then one more chance again.
It is deaf, dumb and blind to the suffering of the victims, and the devastated loved ones they leave behind.
James Yates did a few years behind bars.
The parents of Rhys Jones have to serve a life sentence.
And that is a travesty of justice.
Too often the perpetrators of hideous crimes get to walk free with their lives still ahead of them.
While the lives they stole, or damaged or disfigured for ever, are forgotten by our justice system.
Jon Venables, one of the ten-year-old boys who killed James Bulger, is now a 35-year-old paedophile.
And yet Venables is still protected by the lifelong anonymity given to him and Robert Thompson 25 years ago.
Even as a middle-aged pervert, Venables’ crimes are still being treated with kid gloves.
Venables has been jailed for just 40 months after admitting possessing more than 1,000 images of abused children.
This is the second time he has been jailed for hoarding vile images.
But this repeat offender can appeal for parole as early as October next year and is likely to be home for Christmas.
Is that justice for James Bulger? Is it justice for his parents?
British justice has developed a blind spot for the feelings of victims.
Serial rapist John Worboys has had a block put on his early release after a High Court judge ruled a woman raped by the former taxi driver can appeal against the decision to set him free.
But a judicial review would not be necessary if Worboys had been properly charged for all his hundreds of crimes and not just the token cases the Crown Prosecution Service decided to bring.
Should still be rotting in a cell
Police believe that Worboys was behind as many as 200 sex attacks on female passengers who he drugged and then assaulted.
If he (Worboys) had received punishment that matched his crimes, then he would never have been up for parole after nine lousy years.
Tony Parsons
If he had received punishment that matched his crimes, then he would never have been up for parole after nine lousy years.
Because he would be still rotting in his cell.
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was interviewed a few days ago by a male and female officer from West Yorkshire Police about five unsolved attacks on women.
Sutcliffe, who murdered 13 women and attempted to murder seven more, was interviewed in the presence of his lawyer and a social worker from Bradford social services, present to ensure that the police interview was not “too stressful” for the serial killer.
But who reflects on the unimaginable terror that Sutcliffe’s victims felt in the last moments of their lives?
Who contemplates the torment their loved ones suffer every single day of their lives?
When we fret about the stress of serial killers, our moral compass is on the blink.
It is time we started caring more about their victims.
It is time we started caring more about their victims.
Tony Parsons
The parents of Rhys Jones will never be set free from their grief.
The parents of James Bulger will never get another chance.
The women drugged and raped by John Worboys will carry their scars, both visible and invisible, for the rest of their days, and what they endured will have an impact on every relationship in their lives.
Our justice system should give these innocents a passing thought when prosecuting, and passing sentence, and deciding some evil bastard is no longer a threat to society.
Because, right now, British justice doesn’t give a damn about the victims.
Roo you kidding Donald?
IN Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House, Michael Wolff wrote that Donald Trump fought his thinning locks by having scalp reduction surgery.
Apparently very popular in the Eighties with balding billionaires, the procedure involved surgically removing balding areas and stretching the bits of the bonce with hair, creating a bald oasis of scalp surrounded by strands that are swept up then plastered down with industrial quantities of hairspray.
Apparently very popular in the Eighties with balding billionaires, the procedure involved surgically removing balding areas and stretching the bits of the bonce with hair, creating a bald oasis of scalp surrounded by strands that are swept up then plastered down with industrial quantities of hairspray.
When the wind blew as President Trump was climbing the steps to Hair Force One, the truth was finally out.
That’s not a bald spot, Mr President.
That’s a bald head.
Trump’s follicle furtiveness is very different to our own Wayne Rooney, who has always been totally open about his hair transplant.
Some wag on Twitter wondered if Mick Hucknall had been the donor of Rooney’s rug.
But I think you will find that all that hair belongs to Wayne Rooney.
They just moved it around a bit.
BBC saint should be in sin bin
A BBC radio host called St John Stephen told MP Zac Goldsmith that a death threat sent to an 80-year-old woman for supporting Brexit “should have been addressed to you”.
After making a grovelling apology, this nasty little non-entity has been allowed to keep his job on BBC London.
Are death threats now an acceptable part of public discourse?
This weasel would never have kept his job if he was on the other side of the great Brexit divide.
James Matthews should get a medal
JAMES MATTHEWS, 43, is a former British soldier who fought alongside Kurdish forces in Syria against ISIS.
Arrested on his return to the UK, on Wednesday James appears in a London court to face charges related to terrorism. ARE WE TOTALLY INSANE?
James Matthews fought men who would happily watch our children burn.
There are 60million Brits who believe he should get a medal.
No cheer for our flaky PC brigade
AS grid girls, ring girls and hostesses of every hue are forced to fight for their jobs in the West, a bevy of smiling North Korean cheerleaders arrive in South Korea to support both countries in the Winter Olympics.
Kim Jong-un obviously didn’t get Jon Snowflake’s memo.
Democracy is not for sale, Soros
GEORGE SOROS, the Hungarian-born American billionaire, admits that he has donated £700,000 to groups that are attempting to block or castrate Brexit.
Soros is a man with no love for this country.
Unelected, unaccountable and unwanted, old George is the perfect poster boy for the EU elite.
But the batty billionaire is about to discover that some things in this life are not for sale – and that includes British democracy.
Meanwhile Nick Clegg is being called the biggest hypocrite on the planet for telling the European Union that they made Brexit possible by their “sneering disregard” for patriotism.
Clegg told a think tank in Brussels: “There was an assumption that patriotism was an old-fashioned vestige of an order that was dying away.”
I agree with Nick. The EU was created by men who thought the way to spare Europe from another world war was to do away with national identity.
They had seen the apocalyptic havoc caused by German nationalism and they wanted to make sure it never happened again.
Their mistake, and the reason the European Union carries the seeds of its own destruction, is that to deny love of country is to defy human nature.
And that is why we are leaving, Mr Soros.
Naomi's body conscious
“I’VE always been self-conscious of my body,” says Naomi Campbell.
Funny that. Naomi has always seemed understandably proud of it to me.
Labour attack Tories over women
THIS week saw the 100-year anniversary of women getting the vote – or rather, the 100-year anniversary of SOME women getting the vote.
To qualify for the vote in 1918, the woman had to be over 30 and own property.
Working class women had to wait another ten years for universal suffrage.
But you would never have guessed it from the ludicrous posturing on the Labour benches, who turned the anniversary into an attack on the wicked Tories.
These are the same Tories who have had two women Prime Ministers in the last half century.
And this is the Labour Party that has a shadow chancellor who loves a joke about lynching women.
MOST READ IN OPINION
The same Labour that forced their own council leader Claire Kober to step down after sexism and bullying by Jeremy Corbyn’s goons.
The Labour Party that has never been led by a woman in its 118-year-history.
Labour’s attitude to women has far more in common with Saudi Arabia than it does with the Tories.
