Imps

Angers me this morning reading the Metro about yet another child causing untold misery to another. Yet more grist for the mill of malcontents to bleat over whilst allowing the machinery causing this social rot to stay in place, unchanged, if not torn down.

I cannot give the kind of focus I would like to writing about the underlying causes of this and Edlington, writing this on my phone on the way into work; beside, others have done a considerably better job than I could; I'll follow up later with some of my own experiences.

What I would like to talk about is the approach to sentencing monsters like this; 3 years? For what is likely to have caused permanent psychological scarring of this poor women?

I particularly find his guilty plea galling as there is no mention of remorse; just calls from his lawyer of "anger managment" and "dealing with a very immature young man"; how likely is it that he will see freedom before he sees his 16th birthday?

The solution? The metro piece, and no doubt others, will use this as a call for "tougher sentences", "enquiries" and knee-jerk quango formation when really all we need is something considerably simpler: democratise the justice system.

District judges who found themselves buying into the moral inversion, or electing those magistrates who do, where criminal becomes the "victim of society" will find themselves sentenced to the dole queue. This would dilute the effects of angry victims or relatives acting irrationally against perceived, but reasonable, justice whilst acting as a brake to the judiciary being too light a touch or too ready to implement European law over our own.

You want real justice for victims? We should stop the kneejerk reaction of going to Whitehall to make yet more draconian, unworkable laws; we need justice to be pliable and answerable to it's environment, not fly-by-night politicians. Nothing will change till then.