Ludicrous

When sentencing the real murderer of Lynette White to life imprisonment in July 2003, Mr Justice (Sir John) Royce told Jeffrey Gafoor: “You allowed innocent men to go to prison for a crime that you knew you had committed.”

In October 2005 Royce gave his reasons for imposing the thirteen year tariff – the minimum that Gafoor must serve before he becomes eligible for release on parole – that included the four months that he served on remand before pleading guilty – although he stressed that it didn’t mean that Gafoor would be released that soon.

Nevertheless it was significantly less than the tariffs imposed on two of the entirely innocent Cardiff Three which were between fourteen and eighteen years.

Constraints

Royce believed that he was only allowed to add one third of his starting point (fifteen years) for aggravating circumstances. In this case they were the brutality of the crime and the fact that he had allowed innocent people to be convicted for his crime.

Royce added four years and six months for that. That is bizarre. Despite it being a particularly brutal crime and Gafoor allowing innocent men to suffer, Royce did not impose the maximum for aggravating circumstances. Why not?

He then gave Gafoor credit for an early guilty plea (he has to allow one sixth for that) and also for assisting the police with their current investigation into what went wrong. He deducted three years and six months for mitigation and because Gafoor was caught in 2003 Royce had to apply the law as it was then, which he thought meant that he had to add the amount to twelve years – the standard tariff at that time¹.

Consequently, Gafoor – the real murderer – received a significantly lower tariff than the innocent people he allowed to go to jail. The Cardiff Five served a total of sixteen years hard time in prison. There is a real possibility that the real murderer will serve less time in prison than the innocent men his silence allowed to be convicted. He becomes eligible to apply for parole in 2016.

Wrong

This is obscene and it sends out a message to killers that it is far better for them to allow the innocent to be convicted and do nothing than take responsibility for their crime. Previously, tariffs were determined by the Home Secretary, but after a challenge to the European Court of Human Rights, the court in Strasbourg ruled that the law had to be changed.

Ironically, a decision that gave the powers to set tariffs to judges deprived them of the very discretion they required to deliver justice based on the particular facts of individual cases. Mr Justice Royce found his hands firmly tied when he came to impose the tariff on Gafoor, or believed that they were. The law resulted in serious aggravating circumstances only outweighing comparatively trivial mitigating circumstances by just a year.

Favour

Meanwhile, the system is weighted further in Gafoor’s favour, as he can express remorse, attend the relevant courses and even use the fact that he assisted the inquiry into what went wrong in the original inquiry to support his parole application.

He can point to the fact that in almost eleven years before his arrest on suspicion of the murder of Lynette White he had not come to the attention of police. His only conviction was an assault on a colleague at work in 1992, which resulted in a non-custodial sentence.

An Insult

If Jeffrey Gafoor serves less time in prison than the innocent men he left to rot for his crime, it will be an insult to every concept of justice. It may be too late for the Cardiff Five, but there will be other cases of vindication where the same issues arise.

It is not too late to ensure that judges have the unfettered discretion to set appropriate tariffs in such cases that fit the individual circumstances of those cases. Perhaps it can’t help the Cardiff Five, but justice must surely reflect society’s disgust at criminals who not only commit terrible crimes but allow innocent people to pay the price of their crimes as well.

Anything less disgraces the very name of justice.

Nothing Special

At first glance there is nothing special about December 16^th 1950, but it proved to be one of the most important dates in the history of British justice. It was the day that the veneer of deterrence was stripped away from capital punishment in Britain once and for all. James Ronald Robertson was not just another prisoner who paid the ultimate price for his crime – he was a special category of person who suffered capital punishment.

Robertson was hanged that morning in Barlinie Prison in Glasgow, but he was unique in the annals of people executed in Britain in the twentieth century. If ever a person should have been deterred from committing murder by the death penalty, it should have been Robertson. He was perhaps the most important guilty person executed in Britain in the twentieth century.

Why? Because James Robertson was the only serving police officer to be hanged in Britain in the twentieth century. So what brought a law enforcement officer to face the long drop at the hands of Albert Pierrepoint and his assistant Steve Wade?

The Road to Infamy

Catherine McCluskey died on July 29^th 1950. She had seemingly been the victim of a callous hit and run driver. Her body was left where she fell in the road. It soon became clear to Constable William Kevan that there was more to this than met the eye at first glance. There were no tyre-marks in the road indicating a screeching halt. There was no glass in the road from a sudden stop and McCluskey’s injuries were not consistent with an accidental hit and run.

It was a deliberate murder, which had been badly staged to look like an accident. The killer had not only hit McCluskey, but reversed over her. It could not have been an accident. The woman was soon identified as McCluskey when a friend reported that she had failed to return home to pick up her baby after reports of the death was published. Kevan was told that McCluskey had been having a relationship with a police officer named Robertson.

Investigations established that Robertson was supposed to be on duty on July 29^th, but between 11.15 and 1.30 that night he absented himself from his beat with Constable Dugald Moffat. The lack of an alibi soon became the least of Robertson’s problems. His car was a stolen vehicle with false number plates: the exhaust was damaged and the under-carriage was stained with blood and human hairs. He had run over McCluskey twice.

Disgrace

Charged with vehicle offences and murder, Robertson denied everything at his trial in November 1950. His defence on the car theft charges defied credibility. He claimed to have found it and driven it. A few days later he found the log elsewhere as well. Quite why a police officer would think this behaviour, even if true, was acceptable seems to have escaped him. They were still crimes.

His explanation of McCluskey’s death defied belief. He had met her that night. They argued and he drove off, abandoning her in the road. He then thought better of it and went back for her accidentally reversing into her. This explanation fails to explain how he managed to accidentally run over her twice. It took the jury just over an hour to decide that Constable James Robertson was a murderer.

The Ultimate Punishment

Robertson’s week long trial ended in Lord Justice Keith having the dubious distinction of sentencing a serving police officer to death. The execution was scheduled to take place on December 4^th, but a stay was granted while Robertson appealed. After the appeal was dismissed a new date was set, less than two weeks after the original date.

There was no reprieve, so Robertson became the only serving police officer to face the gallows in Britain in the last century. He was just 33 years-old when he demonstrated that capital punishment was not even a sufficient deterrent to prevent a police officer abandoning his beat to commit murder.

The allegedly ultimate deterrent had failed to stop a serving police officer unlawfully cutting short the life of a woman he was sworn to protect. Could it ever be taken seriously as a deterrent again after such a monumental failure?