PITIFUL SENTENCE BORN OF A BROKEN SYSTEM
HOW is i t possible t hat a man who abducted a child on her way home from school, made threats that he had a knife, held her for 32 terrifying and degrading hours, then throttled and raped her repeatedly, can be sentenced to four years in jail?
Even he said he deserved ‘ a long sentence’. Four years before becoming eligible for parole is not, in anyone’s language, a long sentence.
Fans of the trendy ‘justice journey’ – those who buy in to the fiction that criminals are ‘ stakeholders’ in the justice system – say he is unlikely to be released that soon.
And they say that a lifelong restriction order means that, by jingo, if he so much as steps on a crack on the pavement, he’ll be for it...
What utter conceited, complacent rot.
The latest layer of bureaucracy piled on our courts is the Scottish Sentencing Council, whose key task is ‘to prepare sentencing guidelines for the Scottish criminal courts’.
It held its inaugural meeting in December ‘ when the ground was laid for future work. It was also agreed that guidelines will be widely consulted upon’.
Widely consulted upon? With who, exactly?
It ought to be with the general public, who have for many years been forced to stand slack-jawed at the sort of sentence handed down to Mark Armstrong yesterday.
The hands of High Court judge Lady Wise were tied. She had the perspicacity to tell Armstrong – a cannabis addict – he was ‘cruel, depraved and inhumane’ in contrast to his victim, whose ‘ bravery and resilience was quite remarkable’. But any sentence she passed was always going to be whittled away by discounts that are, effectively, rewards.
When it has come to this, the message the Scottish Sentencing Council ought to be getting from its ‘ wide consultation’ i s that the system is broken. It has been broken by high-handed politicians in thrall to right- on liberals; by do-gooder social workers; and by bureaucrats keen to insulate the courts from the very people – the public – in whose name they operate.
Sentencing should be simplified. Judges who have heard all the facts should be free to hand down a punishment element knowing it will stand. The judge, the perpetrator, the public and – crucially – the victim and their family should be confident the term handed down from the bench is the term that will be served – in full.
The current system is, in reality, taking sentencing out of the courts and the hands of our judges and into the hands of the Parole Board for Scotland. It is, with a few honourable exceptions, packed with former council employees and social workers. They – not Lady Wise – will, in as little as four years, decide if Armstrong should return to the streets.
The waters are muddied further by lifelong restrictions which, on paper, look good. But they are predicated on the police having the resources to monitor people under such restrictions. That is no simple task.
Only last week we reported that 40 people have been murdered, sexually assaulted, attacked or abducted by criminals out on licence or under supervision thanks to soft-touch policies designed to keep criminals out of jail.
How can the public have faith in orders intended to ban this or that behaviour from people who have already clearly demonstrated their inability to live within the strictures of normal society?
THE gulf between what the public expect from justice and what is delivered in Scotland today is made larger by craven politicians who refuse to accept that those who commit crimes set themselves outside the norms of society and should be dealt with accordingly.
People such as Mark Armstrong are not lost waifs needing only a guiding hand. They are deeply dangerous individuals wreaking havoc on innocent lives. Will his schoolgirl victim ever be the same again after the horrors he inflicted?
The No1 priority of any government must be the safety of the populace. It is not to be a trailblazer f or f ashionable notions about justice, crime and punishment.
The disconnect between public and the Government over our courts needs urgent attention.
The next meeting of the Scottish Sentencing Council is scheduled for March 7. The First Minister and her apathetic Justice Secretary Michael Matheson should have on its agenda a blueprint for a complete shake-up, one that clearly links the severity of a crime with the sentence served.