Ministers plan High Court bid to keep the black cab rapist in jail
MINISTERS pledged yesterday to do everything in their power to keep black-cab rapist John Worboys behind bars.
They are considering a High Court legal challenge against the Parole Board’s controversial decision to free the 60-year-old.
The serial sex offender’s imminent release sparked a public outcry, and his many victims said it was disgraceful that he had served just eight years behind bars.
Justice Secretary David Gauke is now taking legal advice on whether to apply for a judicial review to reverse the decision to let him out.
Tory Party chairman Brandon Lewis said those who suffered at Worboys’ hands must be put first.
He told the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 yesterday that if the ‘advice is clear’ on the possibility of a High Court challenge then ‘we will look to do that’.
He added: ‘Every victim, every friend and family of victims, everybody who has read about this case will want to know we are doing everything we can to make sure that the victims are properly protected. It’s absolutely right the Secretary of State for Justice will be doing everything he can to make sure this man stays behind bars.’
London cabbie Worboys was jailed indefinitely in 2009, with the judge setting a minimum term of eight years.
He was jailed for 19 offences against 12 victims but is thought to be one of the country’s most prolific sex offenders after being linked to more than 100 complaints. He drugged his victims with spiked champagne before attacking them in his cab. It later emerged that files relating to 83 separate complainants were referred to prosecutors during the original inquiry.
Following his conviction, a further 19 potential victims came forward but no further cases were brought against him. Since being jailed, he is believed to have changed his name by deed poll to John Radford, in tribute to the footballer who played for Arsenal from 1964 to 1976.
Worboys could be released in weeks after the Parole Board ruled in secret that he no longer posed a threat to the public. He will be freed under licence, with conditions on his freedom.
Richard Scorer, of Slater and Gordon – the legal firm that represented some of the victims, said: ‘Our clients are pleased that their fears and concerns are finally being recognised.
‘ They feel they have been ignored and let down by the criminal justice system. We believe this manipulative serial sex offender is still a danger to the public and releasing him now would put women at risk.’
Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, a former lawyer, said: ‘The public are completely bewildered that Worboys is being released as early as he is. He is a serious criminal and a threat to women. I don’t think his victims nor, frankly, the majority of women are going to be convinced that he doesn’t continue to be a threat to us.’
Sarah Green, of the campaign group End Violence Against Women, added: ‘The Justice Secretary’s attempt to try and stop the release of John Worboys is very welcome.’
‘Still a danger to the public’
WHy all the fuss about the impending release of the ‘ taxi rapist’ John Worboys? The new Justice Secretary, David Gauke, has instructed lawyers to see if he could halt, via judicial review, the parole board’s decision to release the black-cab driver, found guilty in 2009 of 19 sexual assaults (including one of rape) against female passengers he had drugged.
Such a judicial review of a decision by the independent parole board would, I believe, be unprecedented. It reflects the eruption of public outrage at the board’s decision — an eruption which has shaken the Government itself.
But my mystification remains. Because the decision to release Worboys is entirely typical of how the justice system works — and the reason it works that way is because it’s how successive governments have instructed it to act. It has caused brutal bereavement to countless families, including my own.
Protection
There is particular fury about Worboys because more than 100 women have come forward with claims that he drugged and assaulted them: his modus operandi was to tell young female passengers that he had won money in a lottery, and invited them to join him in a bottle of champagne to celebrate. It was spiked with sedatives — and when they took effect, he pounced. But the police and the courts pursued only those cases in which they felt sure of a successful prosecution.
The 2009 trial judge imposed an ‘indeterminate sentence for public protection’, but with a minimum of eight years. That was arrived at by halving the term the judge thought would have been standard for the (dreadful) offences committed.
But why this halving, and why is Worboys being released now? Because that is what happens. For the vast majority of sentences, prisoners are released automatically after serving just half of what the judge has pronounced.
This is nothing to do with justice, but merely a form of arbitrary hotel management: the government is responsible for the prison estate, and would prefer to push out the residents half-way through their stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure, rather than build more cells. Sometimes, when governments are particularly concerned about prison overcrowding, they accelerate this process to include the most dangerous offenders.
It was during such a period of a government-mandated ‘early release programme’ in 2004 (when ‘tough-on-crime’ Tony Blair was prime minister) that a man called Damien Hanson was set free after having served six years of a 12-year sentence for attempted murder. He had used a machete, and the trial judge had recommended that Hanson should serve at least nine years of that term in prison.
But that was ignored, and just three months after his release Hanson murdered my wife’s cousin John Victor Monckton, and also stabbed John’s wife Homeyra with such ferocity that she had ‘no recordable blood pressure’ when the ambulance service arrived at their home — called by their nine-year-old daughter Isobel, who witnessed this horror.
Hanson was obsessed with the idea of violently robbing rich people, and had identified John and Homeyra’s home (John was responsible for running the insurance firm Legal & General’s £35 billion bond portfolio). Hanson got John to open the door of their house in Chelsea by masquerading as a postman, aided by an accomplice, Elliott White — himself out on bail awaiting a court appearance for offences involving heroin and cocaine.
I will never forget the moment, in the early hours of the morning of November 30, 2004, when I was woken by the phone, to hear my wife’s brother Jonathan Monckton saying: ‘I have just been called by the police. They say that John Victor has been murdered and Homeyra has been terribly wounded. She may not survive.’
Naturally, I wanted to find out everything I could about what had led to this tragedy and whether it could have been avoided. What the men at the Metropolitan Police told me, under cover of anonymity, was appalling. Hanson had not even been interviewed by the parole board which sanctioned his release.
It was a tick-box exercise: Hanson had dutifully attended an ‘anger management’ course in prison. The parole board did, as required, carry out a ‘risk assessment’, which actually suggested that this lethal man — who, when I studied him in court, exuded the impervious coldness which we associate with psychopaths — had a ‘91 per cent probability of re-offending’.
Dangerous
yet still the parole board designated him as being in the lowest of three categories of danger to the public.
When I asked a senior policeman at the time if the Hanson case was unique, he shook his head wearily: ‘Scores of people have been released on licence, who are dangerous, unstable, out of their minds on cannabis. But the probation service is overwhelmed. An awful lot of risks are taken by minimally trained people, poorly resourced. you despair, honestly.’
This is, if anything, even more true today, 14 years on. Probation officers tasked with monitoring released violent offenders, especially in London, are more overstretched than ever. Though as one friend, a former prison psychiatrist, put it to me: ‘What is it about probation that would stop people from committing fresh crimes? Going to an office for 15 minutes every two weeks?’
This is borne out by what the Daily Mail revealed just nine days ago. A record number of violent criminals, including 19 murderers, are on the run after breaking their parole conditions. The count includes no fewer than 55 convicted rapists.
It’s true that nearly 99 per cent of offenders known to have broken their parole conditions are returned to custody. But I’m more bothered by the fact of their early release in the first place.
This, obviously, is now the concern of the women who suffered at John Worboys’s hands. Some of them are furious that they were not consulted by the probation service, or even told of his imminent release.
But being ‘consulted’ is a right accorded only to those whose assaults were part of the trial process. And even then, as one criminal lawyer explained to me: ‘What those women feel or fear is irrelevant. Their views are only taken into account insofar as they provide evidence of the likelihood of Worboys reoffending.’
According to police and probation officials quoted in yesterday’s Observer, the person whose account had been most influential with the parole board was an independent psychologist hired by Worboys’s defence team. Fancy.
Violent
This has been denied by the parole board, which adamantly defended its decision, saying it ‘carefully considered a detailed dossier of evidence from nine witnesses — four psychologists, two probation officers and three members of prison staff’. That sounds convincing. But if Worboys is the sort of man who could convince countless women with a carefully calibrated lie, he is perhaps equally able to fool a flotilla of psychologists.
After all, as my friend the former prison psychiatrist once told me: ‘We know that a certain proportion of violent prisoners released early will reoffend: the problem is, we don’t know which ones.’
This helps explain why one in seven murders is committed by men under the supervision of the probation service. As a retired judge — Lindsay Burn, commenting last week on the parole board’s decision to release Worboys — observed, their assessments of a ‘safe release’ take little account of the reality of inadequate monitoring of offenders.
He said: ‘ I had a case in which I sentenced a rapist for imprisonment for public protection, and he was released and committed exactly the same offence again shortly afterwards. His risk clearly could not be managed.
‘Performance and confidence were seriously eroded over my 11 years. It is much more difficult now. We should not pretend the public are safe when they are not.’
Judge Burn is telling us that the Worboys case is far from unusual — which is my point, too. He is notorious, that’s all. Week in, week out, more violent men than the ‘taxi rapist’ are released half-way through their sentences, for no other reason than that it is long- standing government policy. So don’t blame the judges. And don’t be fooled when ministers rush to reassure us.