Courts to consider unthrown keys

Two appeals for

tougher sentencing are significant but not so straightforward

EDITORIAL: Some penalties exist on the books without being conspicuously enacted.

They’re more like the dark warnings of front-seat parents: ‘‘Don’t make me come back there’’.

Though it’s been the case for five years that criminals with first-strike convictions who later commit murders could be jailed for life without parole, it hasn’t happened.

Some will instantly decide this is a travesty of namby-pamby sentencing.

It’s true that we haven’t been locking up people and throwing away the key.

But let’s not forget that a separate penalty, preventive detention, is keeping the key out of reach of what’s generally characterised as our worst class of violent and sexual offenders.

The experience has been that people sentenced to this open- ended sentence do not go on to trouble the public.

Trouble is, there are offenders who, horrific though their crimes have been, aren’t sociopaths whose pattern of offending triggers preventive detention. Which is why life without parole, as a separate sentence, does potentially have a place.

The Crown is appealing against a pair of High Court sentences where they contend the judges shouldn’t have stepped back from imposing life without parole.

In the case of Justin Vance Turner, the complication is the 29-year-old could otherwise face as long as 59 years behind bars.

Hard to see a lot of public sympathy for that thinking; and older offenders are surely entitled to cry ageism.

As for Shane Pierre Harrison, his first official ‘‘strike’’ was for sexually groping a policewoman.

Hardly a trivial offence, though it’s difficult to imagine it was what what the lawmakers had in mind as the first of two steps to a lifelong sentence. (In which case, isn’t the law badly drafted?)

The suspicion arises that the guts of the Crown’s appeal isn’t unrelated to the hideous nature of Harrison’s other offending.

His second strike was a joint role in a gang-related murder, and his awful record includes a gang- torture manslaughter conviction that happened before the ‘‘strike’’ legislation was enacted. Essentially the Crown seems to be saying if you stand back a bit, that first strike seems unfair, but if you stand back further still, it looks just fine again. It’s a matter of perspective, see? So, then. A couple of significant cases, whichever way the Crown appeal goes.