REWRITE THAT SENTENCE

Earlier postings were extracted from my book Common Sense, which can be downloaded free from my website – just click on COMMON SENSE: The BOOK in the sidebar. Here are new thoughts, previously unpublished, provoked by current events. Feel free to engage ...

Two teenagers have been sentenced at the Old Bailey for murder this week. They stabbed a man in the street, making off with his mobile phone, his oyster card and a small amount of cash. They were given "minimum terms" of 21 years (for the 19 year-old) and 17 years (for the 18 year-old). Frankly, I don't think it's enough.

Now, I wasn't in court and I haven't read the transcripts. It's unwise to make sweeping assumptions based on newspaper reports of trials. Nonetheless, this appears to be a peculiarly straightforward case with no detectable mitigating circumstances. And the sentences are consistent with those meted out to other opportunistic, petty-theft-related killings. So I cleave to my view. I don't think it's enough. Even should the younger killer serve his full term, he will be 35 when released, a mere four years older than was his victim at the time of his death. 17 years from now, the victim would have been 48, probably at the peak of his career. His fiancee, his parents, his friends feel bereft and robbed. I think they'd be wholly entitled to feel vengeful too.

Vengefulness is not an emotion we are supposed to indulge. We are expected to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to bury our grief by hoping for the killers' redemption. Well, bugger that. If anyone I loved were taken from me by knife-wielding thug, by suicide-bombing fanatic or indeed by drunken driver, I suspect that my instinct would assuredly be to go out and kill somebody in their turn. Don't let's be squeamish about these things. If you're religious or liberal, you perhaps genuinely can find some degree of charity in your heart for the killer. Not me.

My question, I feel sure, would be Lear's: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,/And thou not breath at all?" (King Lear, Act V, scene III). Why indeed should those rats, those who killed for trash, live? As one bereaved by murder, required by the ghoulish media to make some public statement on the steps of the Old Bailey, I fancy I should want to say something like this:

"21 years is a piffling punishment for robbing someone else of perhaps 50, 60 or even 70 years of life and for robbing me of that person's love for so long. Why should these dehumanized husks of men have any kind of expectation of a resumed life? If the juridical process cannot eliminate these degenerates who, at 40 and 35, will certainly not be too advanced in years to visit similar crimes on others, then I, if I have wind and limb, will seek them out and do so myself at some point after their release. Or rather, to make a better match with their cruelty to me, perhaps I will seek out and eliminate their own loved ones, if they have any such". Even were the threat more token than real, the making of it should a) provoke a useful public debate about the role of vengeance and b) give the murderers a worm of dread to eat into what passes for their minds while they serve their terms.

Is there an argument for restoring the death penalty? I supported abolition as vehemently as anyone in the run-up to its enactment 40 years ago. It was a different world then. Guns were only known to the denizens of organized crime and barely at all to the police. The knife culture was an unimagined concept. Kids roamed in gangs and fought with fists and maybe with bike chains but they did not go about armed, save for the flick-knives that were more feared than actually carried. Murder was so rare as to be sensational, usually a crime passionnel or some Frankenstein's monster-like misfortune perpetrated by some retarded soul. Capital crimes were really rare.

Today barely an edition of the 6 o'clock News passes without bodies being found or somebody being sentenced for murder. And these are just the cases that make "a good story". The majority of killings go virtually unreported, meriting no more than a paragraph in a local newspaper, if that. The want-it-now philosophy reinforced continuously by the bombardment of advertising has its impact on people's tempers too. Why should I simmer down, "count up to ten" as an earlier generation advised, when I can have what I want – the end of a relationship, peace and quiet, triumph over a rival – by a nice quick killing? Murder, like sex crime, is really about exercising power over someone else. Our culture urges us constantly to seize power, to stand up for our "rights", to grab what we want, to triumph. To end someone else's life is to impose the ultimate sanction, to be like a god.

Tony Blair, a great one for squirming in the face of contradictions, got cross with journalists who persisted in questioning whether his support for the execution of Iraqi justice meant that he agreed with the execution of Saddam Hussein. Blair, with his Christian conscience and lip-service to liberal social policy, couldn't bring himself to say that any human being should die, however "evil" (his word, not mine). You wonder how he squares that with his knowledge that he sent troops into Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians. Ah yes, "collateral damage". Unfortunate but an inevitable price to be paid for a necessary operation. Not the same as deliberately stringing a man up. Oh, think it through, Tony.

I don't in the end rescind my opposition to capital punishment, even for the two teenaged stabbers whose claim for mercy seems to me to have less merit than any I can imagine. But I don't think they should be out of jail before they are 60 years old. Let us feel safe from them. There could hardly be a crueller fate than to be murdered – or to have a loved one murdered – by someone who has been released into the community after doing time for a previous murder. In such circumstances, I'd want to take my vengeance on the judge who imposed an inadequate sentence and the parole board who released the killer. Suppose that goon Michael Stone had managed to breach Stormont security and carry out his mission to assassinate Gerry Adams. Where would that leave the ludicrous policy of granting a so-called "political amnesty" to subhumans who claim a political justification for murder and mayhem? No less bankrupt than before but at least demonstrably so to politicians, that's where.

So, I have a Modest Proposal. Let sentencing policy be determined less by some academic tariff set for the severity of the crime and more by the need to keep the individual perpetrators out of circulation. How can it be fitting for a convicted murderer to be walking the streets a free man at the age of 35? Which of us will be safe from him?

And yes I know that the jails are overcrowded and to keep people in for much longer stretches would only exacerbate the problem. But I suggest that we have too many crimes that carry a jail sentence. The fool of a man who works as "royal editor" (whatever that means) for the News of the World and his contact, supposedly a "private detective", evidently qualified themselves for jail sentences by tapping into private phone conversations. To stick them in jail would be most satisfying to the vengeful feelings that many will have allowed themselves in the light of their guilty admissions. But this kind of white collar crime can be punished in other ways. Fine them. I mean, really fine them. Let independent auditors go through their personal accounts and, on the basis of their findings, let the courts impose stringent on-going financial penalties that will keep them impoverished for a couple of decades. Again, the penalties need to be tailored not to some standard tariff but to a level that determines a precise period over which these individuals will suffer penalties. The public purse would be satisfyingly swelled too.