NICK FERRARI Another obscene judgment
nick.ferrari@express.co.uk
JUST when you thought it was impossible for our unelected judges or lunatic law lords to hand down any ruling or sentence that would be capable of surprising you any more, one comes along that is as obscene as it is inadequate.
In their wigs and tights and looking like well-padded 19th-century courtesans, those who sit in judgment of us never fail to prove the old adage that the law is an ass. Indeed, they conspire to make it more like a paddock full of clappedout donkeys.
However, the crowning clinker of shameful sentencing was delivered by one judge last week who decided to spare a teenage schoolboy who raped a five-year-old girl from jail because, in his view, society was to blame.
Excuse me? Society is made up of people like you and me and I’m damned certain there’s nothing we’ve done to persuade a 14-year-old boy to tie an apron around a girl’s eyes while he was being paid to babysit her and then cajole the poor mite into performing a sex act after he told her she was going to get a piece of chocolate.
This vile young pervert is now 15 and wore his school uniform when he appeared in the dock at Cambridge Crown Court. Shame he didn’t keep his regulation school trousers on the night last December he was paid £10 to care for a neighbour’s child.
His identity is protected by law but surely any parent thinking of using a seemingly decent teenage lad to provide a bit of care for an infant has a right to know they are about to employ someone who is clearly in training to be the stuff of childhood nightmares and sees a preschool toddler as a sex object.
The teenaged rapist’s defence team painted a sorry picture of how their client, the son of a businessman, was a solitary soul who had descended into a life of addiction to pornography viewed on a laptop at his home without the knowledge of his parents. He was, they said, full of remorse and fearful of the
Aconsequences of the moment he “lost his mind”. Really. Does anyone care how the terrified girl felt?
As an adult, the youthful sex offender could have got a six-and-a-half-year stretch in jail. As a minor, he was given a three-year community order and has to register his address with police for twoand-a-half years.
Judge Gareth Hawkesworth told the boy: “You have become sexualised by your exposure to and the corruption of pornography.” He went on: “It was the fault of the world and society.” What on earth is the judge thinking? Even if there is a shred of truth to this dubious mitigation, is he really arguing that it allows a boy on the verge of manhood to behave worse than an animal?
Didn’t the fact that the potential paedophile tied a Hello Kitty apron around the poor toddler’s eyes show some proof he knew what he was about to do was downright wrong?
Judge Hawkesworth is no stranger to controversial sentencing in this area. Last year he spared Turon Ali, 26, from jail after he was rumbled for grooming a 14-year-old girl for sex by the would-be victim’s brother. On that occasion, Judge Hawkesworth told Ali: “You are simply a young man who was unable to control his sexual urges.” M’lud, she was FOURTEEN for God’s sake. LL THE time liberal judges such as Hawkesworth seek to blame the world, society or possibly a lack of extra helpings of pudding at school meals, for serious sexual crimes how can the victims or their loved ones have any confidence the wrong-doers will be punished?
It should not be the role of the judiciary seemingly to side with the offender and hunt down justification for acts that, in this instance, would not disgrace the Marquis de Sade.
The judiciary should be protecting and punishing and until we can “judge the judges” warped verdicts like this will continue to shock. DEEPEST commiserations to you if you’re reading this in any city, town or hamlet that falls under the jurisdiction of Staffordshire Police. If you’re a visitor, I urge you to get out. Fast. If you’re a resident, tough.
One day though, you might be able to vote for a police chief who could challenge the absurd events of last Thursday. Courtesy of these “We haven’t got a Clouseau” cops, everything from the Army to those ludicrous decontamination tents that look like the cake tent at the village fete were scrambled to an incident on the M6. Coach passengers were ordered to disembark, treated as if they were suffering from the bubonic plague and held in a specially marked-off area. The Army bomb squad raced to the scene along with no fewer than 17 police cars, eight police vans, 13 fire engines and four ambulances. The operation cost more than £100,000 and some motorists were delayed for up to seven hours, missing flights and hospital appointments. The cause of this potential Armageddon? A passenger had one of those odd cigarette substitutes that emits a vapour and the Keystone Cops, sorry Staffordshire Police, decided to take what they later defended as “appropriate” action.
One copper boarding the coach and asking who the bag belonged to would have had it resolved in minutes. But the chance to mount a full-scale training exercise was too good to miss. Note to Staffs Police: we’ve all seen your guns, shields, helmets and paramilitary black uniforms now but in future just stick to traffic. SO THE BBC paid £150,000 of public money to one of those weird “headhunting” firms to find them a new boss and they come up with... a bloke who has been working there for nearly 25 years.
The new director general will be George Entwistle, who joined as a graduate trainee in 1989 and has never worked anywhere else. He’s a former editor of Newsnight so I’m sure he’s done his time at the coal face but why did they need to spend so much of our cash if the best person was just down the corridor? IN THE ceaseless (and inane) pursuit of modernity two of our most important bodies sustained radical overhauls last week. It was announced police numbers will be cut, stations will be closed and police “offices” will be relocated to libraries or supermarkets.
Meanwhile, the Army has been cut to the lowest number of personnel since the Boer War, beloved regiments dating back centuries have been disbanded forever and we’re told a reserve army is the answer.
So when we need a copper we have to go to Sainsbury’s and when we need a soldier we’ll get someone who can fit it in around their real job.
Isn’t progress great? HOSPITAL staff have been told off for using terms such as “sweetie” and “darling” when dealing with elderly patients. It is overly familiar and lacks respect, says a report from the ludicrously misnamed Care Quality Commission. Meanwhile, allowing a patient to die of thirst on a ward despite his calling 999 for the police to try and save him, as was revealed at a major London teaching hospital last week, passes for nursing these days. ANGRY Lib Dems announce they will block boundary changes proposed by the Conservatives if Nick Clegg’s plan for an elected House of Lords is scuppered by a Tory revolt and in so doing brilliantly demonstrate why Clegg and his band of disillusioned dimwits are so hopelessly out of touch with the public. It’s hard to think of two things that resonate less with the public than Lords reform or boundary changes.