Benefit of Idiocy
'No way bro almost killed someone’
A group of teenage boys gang rape two girls on two separate occasions, film the crimes and laugh about doing it. As a punishment, they are condemned to community service, with Mr Justice Nicholas Rowland explaining at Southampton Crown Court last month that ‘I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.’
The decision did not go down well with the public, many of whom have grown restless at court decisions, and struggle to understand sentencing guidelines which seem alien to natural justice.
The judge has form; in 2023 he handed out a suspended sentence to a paedophile found with the most serious grade of child abuse images, despite five previous convictions. As it is, the offender failed to abide by the conditions of his suspended sentence and went to jail anyway. Most people would regard unpaid work as a small price to pay to avoid prison, but many criminals are not future orientated enough to see things that way.
In the more recent case, the judge chose to be lenient because the two rapists were not only young, but too stupid to understand what they had done. This is not unusual – many vicious and violent criminals escape serious punishment because the law sees low intelligence as mitigation.
Indeed, it’s curious that two factors which now routinely lead to lower sentences – or, in the case of the teenage rapists, no punishment at all – are arguably good reasons to keep offenders in for much longer, since both youth and stupidity are suggestive of a higher risk of reoffending.
Take the case of the teenage boy who last year threw a 5-kilo sofa off a balcony in the Westfield shopping centre, his lark filmed by a friend who posted it on Snapchat with the caption ‘No way bro almost killed someone’ and ‘Nahhh’ followed by laughing emojis.
During the court proceedings, the defence lawyer for the boy who filmed the lark said that a psychiatric report had found her client to have low levels of maturity, leaving him particularly susceptible to peer pressure, and that he had ‘some significant learning needs’. Yes, I think you proved that.
Perhaps he hasn’t won first prize in the genetic lottery raffle, but if someone is so stupid that they cannot foresee the consequences of a sofa landing on a person beneath them, is that not an argument for keeping them away from the public?
Last June, an innocent man called Kamran Aman was murdered in a racist attack by two teenage lowlifes who showed no remorse for the horrendous and unprovoked killing. As well as a chaotic home life and history of substance abuse, one mitigating factor put forward by the defence was that one of the killers was of ‘exceptionally low’ intelligence and had ‘limited capacity to consider the consequences’ of his actions. Yet the two murderers will be only 33 and 30 upon release, plenty of time for a renewed and rich criminal career, and indeed the sentences were subsequently sent to the court of appeal for being too lenient. We await their ruling.
