Police widow urges ministers to act now on prison-term law
THE widow of Pc Andrew Harper will today urge the Home and Justice Secretaries to introduce a fixed minimum term for murderers and killers of police and other emergency service workers.
Lissie Harper will tell Priti Patel and Robert Buckland “it’s time” to change the law to set a fixed tariff for killers of emergency services workers, similar to Ireland where the capital murder of a policeman or prison officer carries a 40-year minimum term.
“It needs to happen now,” she told The Daily Telegraph.
Pc Harper was killed by Henry Long, 19, Albert Bowers, 18, and Jessie Cole, 18, after being dragged along a country lane by their car as they made a getaway from a late-night burglary in Berkshire that he had been called to investigate. Long was jailed for 16 years and Bowers and Cole for 13 years.
Arguing for a fixed, unchangeable sentence, she said: “When it comes to sentencing, there’s a lot of guidelines that [courts] can go down the line with and it is just not clear what exactly should be happening.
“That’s where Harper’s law would be different. It would be: ‘This is going to happen. There is no guidance.’ That’s partly where it is going wrong. It’s about time things change.”
A key discussion will be about what the tariff or minimum sentence should be. “That’s something we want to discuss … something that is appropriate for taking someone’s life in [Andrew’s] situation,” she said.
“Soft” sentences like those meted out to her husband’s killers were, she said, “making a mockery of the whole system. It is not going to deter people as much as if they were getting a justifiable sentence.”
She acknowledged there should be flexibility to avoid “unintended consequences” such as an offender who accidentally killed an emergency worker.
The proposed law would cover murder as well as offenders who killed while committing a crime.
“There’s a breed of criminals nowadays that just don’t have respect for the police,” said Mrs Harper.
Asked if she felt any forgiveness for the killers of her husband, she said: “No, they showed no remorse whatsoever even to the extent of making the situation so much harder just by being really disrespectful to all of us. That’s why Harper’s law is really important to me because it’s something I can do.”
She said she was not “particularly surprised” that Bowers and Cole were appealing their sentences. “They are just milking the system. It goes back to the whole no remorse thing,” she said.
Her petition for a change in the law has so far been signed by almost 650,000 people.
‘There’s a breed of criminals nowadays that just don’t have respect for the police’