Ten years ago on this day, two beautiful English girls, Holly Marie Wells and Jessica Aimee Chapman were murdered by Ian Huntley in Soham,
England. Too bad, the death penalty was abolished in the late 1960’s and Ian Huntley cannot pay with his life. I wished that I could shoot him in the
stomach with an FN FAL rifle and let him bleed to death for a few hours. He
will probably squeal like a pig, just like Amrozi the Smiling Assassin. This is
an act of justice and not revenge.
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Holly Marie Wells and
Jessica Aimee Chapman
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I am personally proud
of Holly Wells’s parents when they did not allow Ian Huntley to destroy their
lives. For those murdered victims’ family members whose killers were not
sentenced to death, I do hope that you can at least learn from them. All the
more, we leave it to God but the judicial system and the abolitionists will
answer to God for causing more innocent lives. Matthew Henry, John Calvin and St. Thomas Aquinas agree that the government
will answer to God for failing in their duty to protect society.
These two articles
will be in memory of them.
Why I'd
gladly hang Huntley
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Simon Heffer
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Simon Heffer
Last updated at 17:41 26 April 2004
The liberal society has been guilty of many
mistakes over the past 40 years. However, none was quite so profound as the
abolition of the death penalty for murder, as many were reminded with the
conviction of Ian Huntley yesterday.
There is, quite simply, no reason to keep Huntley
alive.
Yet for the next few decades he will be held, at
high expense, in one of Her Majesty's prisons.
As is the way with the liberal society, his welfare
and wellbeing will undoubtedly be the subject of far more concern than those of
Jessica and Holly's families.
Not only is it hard to keep sentimentality and
emotion out of a case such as this, it is utterly wrong. Our law is founded, or
should be founded, on justice. And justice means doing what human beings,
emotional and sentimental as they may be, believe to be right.
No punishment can bring those innocent girls back.
There is, though, the wider question of public faith in the rule of law - a
belief in what the judge, Mr Justice Moses, called the country's 'obligations
to protect the weak and vulnerable'.
It is an understatement to say that those
obligations are hardly being fulfilled. When the man who has killed two
tenyear- old girls is in court, answering charges relating to their murder, it
is already too late to fulfil them, or even to talk of fulfilling them.
Indeed, many people, including me, have long
wondered whether the failure to fulfil those obligations may have something to
do with the utter inadequacy of the punishment for such vicious, cruel and
callous murders.
There are many arguments against the death penalty.
Some people believe it is never right for the State
to take life, or that the risk of executing an innocent man or woman by mistake
is one that we should not countenance.
Others argue that the State does have that right,
but the mechanics of execution are brutal and degrading. Perhaps they are, but
I am sure I am not the only person who would happily pull the lever for
Huntley.
I happen to believe that, with the democratic
consent of the people, the State does have the right to take life.
I do not know whether, if the death penalty had
existed, Huntley would have been deterred from murder. He had a history of
'interest' in young girls and was known to the police. His perversion may be so
strong that the prospect of his own death may not have stood in his way. The
truth is that we shall never know.
However, statistics show that the taking of
innocent life is now more commonplace than before 1964, when some murderers
were still being hanged.
Surely it cannot be wrong to make a link between
the application of the death penalty and the incidence of murder?
For me, though, that is not the main issue.
Instead, it is a question of what the appropriate punishment is. Is it really
appropriate to lock Huntley up, even for ever, in a secure unit where he will
be kept safe from the retributive attitudes of other, less ghastly, criminals?
I feel it is not. I do not support the death
penalty for all murders. But for a crime as bestial and calculated as this,
where a young man has murdered two small girls for what can only be construed
as his own gratification, anything less than Huntley paying with his own life
is singularly inappropriate.
Thanks to the liberal society, of course, Huntley
will not pay the fair price. Of course, there will be much hand-wringing among
those who govern us about the fate of these two poor girls, and about how such
a crime must never happen again.
But, sadly, it will happen again. And it will
happen again because our rulers systematically put the rights of criminals
above the rights of their victims and the victims' families.
I do not know how any politician can stand up and
say to the parents of Holly and Jessica, or indeed of any other innocent person
murdered in this country, that some cause is served by preserving the life of
the perpetrator of so evil a crime.
I cannot fathom what that cause is, except the
salving of the conscience of a liberal sensitivity.
It is especially easy for Government ministers,
living under police protection in grace-and favour residences, to pronounce on
what is good for what the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, once called 'ordinary
people'.
The fact of the matter is that in the real world,
where all too few of our politicians live, 'ordinary people' are largely
unprotected in an increasingly vicious and heartless society.
Much has changed - for the worse - since 1964, when
the last murderers went to the gallows in Britain. It is not just that the
widespread availability and use of drugs has made human life much cheaper, and
removed much of the psychological restraint on people killing in the pursuit of
gain or gratification.
It is also that the absence of any effective
deterrent for murderers diminishes their fear, making it easier for them to
kill. For Huntley, his attack on Jessica and Holly was a reasonable gamble.
If it had not been for a gamekeeper in Lakenheath
investigating an 'horrendous smell' in a drainage ditch, the girls' bodies may
never have been found. Huntley might have got away with his hideous crime.
And, he probably calculated, even if he had been
caught, the worst he could expect was a lifetime watching TV, completing an
Open University degree course, and being kept at someone else's expense
indefinitely.
The terrible prospect (for him) of losing his own
life never entered into it. It is all very well for judges and politicians to
talk of protecting the vulnerable.
The truth is that the vulnerable are not being
protected.
Hardly a day goes past without murders occurring,
scarcely less shocking and sickening than those of Holly and Jessica - of
elderly people battered to death in sheltered accommodation, of householders
murdered trying to defend their property, of children killed for sexual
pleasure, or of teenagers slaughtered in drive-by shootings.
It would, of course, be wrong to base the argument
for the restoration of capital punishment on one case: even one as appalling as
Huntley's.
However, this case is one that illustrates
perfectly the utter failure of our rulers to manage and control the
self-gratifying, anything-goes society that, with their connivance, has been
created over the past 40 years.
Today, people are united in grief for the families
of Holly and Jessica. We must hope that Huntley's punishment, inadequate though
it be, will bring some solace to them for the loss of their beloved children.
However, so long as Huntley and other murderers
like him live, we shall inhabit a society where evil is, in the twisted minds
of the potential killer, all but condoned.
Tragically, the only position taken by our rulers
towards such wickedness is their surrender to it - and their utter hypocrisy in
claiming to be fighting it.
HUNTLEY’S LAWSUIT INSULTS HIS VICTIMS AND THE NATION
Monday August 2, 2010
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Leo McKinstry
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By Leo McKinstry
OUR woeful
criminal justice system is an affront to civilisation.
The vulnerable are no longer
protected, nor are offenders effectively punished.
All self-confidence has drained away
from the courts and the police, now gripped by bureaucracy and
politically-correct dogma.
In a bizarre inversion of morality,
the state is more zealous about guarding the human rights of criminals than
those of the law-abiding public.
One graphic symbol of this moral
decline is the child killer Ian Huntley, who murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells
and Jessica Chapman in the Cambridgeshire town of Soham in 2002. So many
aspects of the case point to a system in crisis, such as the reluctance by the
police and social services to take any tough action against Huntley before his
lethal crime, despite a string of allegations about his predatory behaviour
towards adolescents.
Equally shameful was the derisory term
of just 21 months served by his girlfriend Maxine Carr, who created a false
alibi for Huntley. As if this saga could not get more depressing, now comes
another appalling blow. Instead of showing remorse for his evil deeds, Huntley
is out to grab a huge sum from the taxpayer over his treatment in prison.
Having been sentenced to a minimum
jail term of 40 years, Huntley languishes in HMP Frankland in County Durham. He
was moved there in March after another inmate slashed him across the throat
with a razor blade hidden in a toothbrush. The incident left Huntley not only
with a seven-inch scar but also a determination to milk the ludicrous
compensation culture.
So Huntley, one of
the most reviled killers in British history, is suing the Ministry of Justice
for £100,000 for the injury he received. This claim, which includes a demand
for £60,000 on the grounds that society should have “done more” to protect him,
makes a mockery of justice.
After what he did, he
does not deserve a penny from the taxpayer. It is an absurdity that a beast
like him should even be allowed to begin such a legal action. All convicted
offenders should be barred by law from seeking compensation. By their actions,
they should have forfeited the rights that belong to decent citizens. His
six-figure lawsuit is a profound insult to the families of Jessica and Holly,
each of whom received just £11,000 under the Criminal Injuries Compensation
Scheme for the suffering that Huntley inflicted on them.
Only in the sick
world of modern judicial Britain could a murderer challenge for almost 10 times
the financial recompense that relatives of his victims received. But his claim
is not just an offence against morality, it makes no sense. Huntley has tried
to kill himself at least three times in prison. So why is he complaining when
another inmate attempts to do the job for him?
A swift end is what he appears to have been seeking since he began his sentence. Tragically, despite this weekend’s assertions that it will “vigorously defend the case”, the Ministry of Justice will probably negotiate a deal with Huntley, showing its usual moral cowardice and contempt for the British public. “They will try and settle this out of court if they can,” says one ministry insider.
Already, even before a payout is agreed, it seems certain that Huntley will receive legal aid to fight his case, so as taxpayers we will all be forced to support the legal antics of this brute. Blood money down a moral sewer is the only way to describe the farce. All this could have been avoided if Huntley had been executed in 2002. That is the punishment his terrible crimes merited.
Hanging would not have been barbarous, as opponents of the death penalty would no doubt argue. It would, in truth, have been an act of the highest morality, providing closure for his victims’ families and justice for our society.
His execution would have ended all this expensive nonsense of lawsuits. Far too often infamous lifers use our misnamed human rights culture to create a drama around themselves. We saw it with the nonstop, self-pitying campaign by Myra Hindley for early release and in mass murderer Dennis Nilsen’s vile demand, predictably funded by legal aid, to be provided with hard-core gay porn in his cell.
The gallows would have ended such absurdities, just as they would have prevented other inmates trying to act as lynch mobs. The prison system is forced to spend more than £1million a year protecting Huntley from other convicts, giving him a constant watch by three teams of two officers. Many would, understandably, say attacks from other inmates are no more than Huntley deserves.
But doesn’t that undermine the argument that the death penalty is more barbaric than a life sentence? The truth is that capital punishment is the badge of a civilised society. England was a far gentler, more well-ordered and cohesive place in the Fifties when we executed monsters like Huntley.
Since the death penalty’s abolition in 1965 sentences have been downgraded because the ultimate sanction no longer exists. When even murder carries a tariff of barely a decade, all other crimes, including rape, manslaughter and robbery, are treated as minor offences.
And given advances in DNA technology and stricter rules on evidence, there would be little danger of miscarriages of justice. But it takes courage and moral conviction to execute heinous killers. These are qualities our enfeebled state badly lacks and that is precisely why Huntley has been able to launch this grotesque lawsuit.
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