Take a leaf out of your colleague’s book m’luds
WHEN Judge Lady Rae sat down to compose her judgment before the sentencing of Alexander Pacteau last Tuesday, she knew there was nothing she could say or do which would ease the suffering of Karen Buckley’s family. But she also knew something that Irish judges often seem to miss: there was plenty she could say or do which would make their pain a whole lot worse.
How many times have we seen bereaved families stumbling, dazed and disappointed, out of Irish courts after a killer has been given a meagre sentence for manslaughter? How many victims of rape or assault or violent burglary have told how the leniency shown to their attackers reopened their wounds?
How many families have described the horror of meeting a relative’s murderer on the street after a ridiculously short ‘life’ term, the criminal free to resume his existence before they’d even begun to accept their own loved one was gone forever?
Nothing Judge Lady Rae could have done would bring Karen Buckley back to her family. But there was plenty she could do to make it a tiny bit easier for them to live with their loss. And she did it without hesitation.
She batted off his defence counsel’s argument that Pacteau’s behaviour after the murder shouldn’t influence the sentence as he hadn’t been convicted of ‘defeating the ends of justice’. As far as she was concerned, she said, Pacteau’s determined efforts to dispose of Karen’s body over several days gave the lie to any plea of panic or spontaneity in the murder.
This was not a man who had acted impulsively and instantly regretted a moment of madness. Instead, he trawled the DIY shops looking for caustic soda, taking care not to alert suspicions by purchasing too much in any one store. This was a man who put time and effort into researching the best methods of destroying a corpse, a man who spun nasty lies about his victim so as to blacken her reputation and throw police off his scent.
And this was a man who, throughout interviews with social workers, ‘at no point used the words regret, remorse or sorry’.
We have seen our share of remorseless, impassive psychopaths come before the Irish courts, too. But what we have never seen, or even heard, is an Irish judge passing sentence on a murderer.
We have read excerpts from their judgments in the papers, or heard them read by reporters on the airwaves, but nothing quite compares with the spectacle of an angry judge, in full flight, tearing a strip off a brutal murderer before condemning him to spend the next 23 years, at least, in one of the toughest prisons in the world.
The Scottish justice system is not very different to ours, and like ours it carries an obligation that justice be administered in public – that it be seen to be done. Here, though, justice is only ‘seen to be done’ by court reporters, the participants and those members of the public interested enough to go along.
The i dea behind public j ustice is accountability – and maybe if judges knew the wider public would be scrutinising their reasoning and decisions, they might be more mindful of their duty to that community, and not just to the criminals.
MAYBE if judges knew they were being watched by the people who paid their salaries, f or example, they wouldn’t need sentencing guidelines from the Minister for Justice to tell them that criminal gangs who prey repeatedly on the rural elderly should be put away for a very long time.
And maybe if young offenders saw a fully robed up and bewigged judge passing a harsh sentence, as opposed to the nice men in lounge suits who preside over the children’s court, they might just think twice about their career choices.
No sentence or punishment imposed on Pacteau could bring Karen Buckley back, and her murder will always be the most obscene injustice imaginable. But the empathy of an eminent judge, and the full crushing weight of a legal system that truly puts a value on human life, means it wasn’t compounded by the further injustice of a feeble judicial response.