SENTENCE THAT DISGRACES OUR COURTS

TWO crime-related stories in last Saturday’s Mail had an identical outcome. I’ll get to that later, but here are the two, very different, cases.

In the first, a 44-year-old lorry driver called Dean Phoenix was found guilty of killing three-year-old Jaiden Mangan by ‘careless driving’.

Phoenix was seen ‘swearing, gesticulating and sarcastically clapping another driver’, swerved round him — and crushed the little boy crossing the road on his bike (alongside his mother and sister). It emerged after the trial that Phoenix had been previously convicted of the murder, by strangling, of his wife Naomi and therefore was ‘on licence’ when he mowed down Jaiden.

The second story was about the sentencing of a 26-yearold prison guard, Emily Watson, who had ‘performed a sex act on Christmas Day’ on a prisoner called John McGee. On a later date, in the same cell, the two had ‘sexual intercourse’. When Watson was interviewed by police about the incidents, she made a full confession.

Now here’s the identical conclusion to the two cases. Both Dean Phoenix and Emily Watson were given a prison sentence of 12 months. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Jaiden’s grandmother, Mandy, would certainly agree. She shouted out in court: ‘He has killed two people in his life and that’s all he gets!’ Understandably, the murder of his wife was not deemed relevant to the circumstances of the second crime: but still, judges can give a sentence of up to five years for ‘causing death by careless driving’.

In extreme contrast, far from anyone being killed as a result of Ms Watson’s admitted offence of ‘misconduct in public office’, all she inflicted was pleasure. Under what rational system of justice do the crimes of Emily Watson and Dean Phoenix deserve the same punishment?