Insults and Injuries

By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (March 30^th 2025)

Another Insult

In October 2005 Mr Justice (Sir John) Royce gave convicted killer Jeffrey Gafoor a tariff of 12 years and 8 months – an extra four months had been deducted for the time he spent on remand, meaning Gafoor was eligible to apply for parole just 13 years after his arrest for the atrocious murder of sex-worker, Lynette White. The tariff that Gafoor had received was incredibly lenient, especially as it was the most brutal murder of its type in Welsh history at that time (St Valentine’s Day 1988) a – he had slit her throat to the spine and stabbed her more than 50 times, half of which were to her breasts.

It was a grotesque sexually-motivated murder that involved immense brutality, yet the punishment imposed on the actual killer was staggeringly lenient, just 13 years. That insulted the memory of Lynette White.

Correct Tariff?

It was claimed that the law demanded that Gafoor had to be sentenced as he would have been at the relevant time, so Royce reduced his starting point to 12 years, adding just a year after balancing aggravating and mitigating factors, but was that tariff correct? There were other cases from the relevant time where judges set a starting point of 15 years and stuck with it – either those judges were wrong or Royce was, but there was more.

If the tariff was correctly imposed according to the law at the relevant time, then the tariffs imposed on the Cardiff Three (Yusef Abdullahi, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris) should have been similar at least. Arguably, Miller’s and Paris’ were, 12 years and 14 years respectively, but Abdullahi’s was 18 years. If the tariffs recommended by Mr Justice (Sir John) Leonard in the early 1990s were correct for that time and there was no challenge to them at the time or since, then Gafoor’s tariff should have been at least as long as Abdullahi’s.

It shames British justice that the innocent – two out of three of them – received harsher tariffs than the guilty Gafoor for the same crime. It had the additional unfortunate effect of making Gafoor eligible to apply for parole earlier than the public would have liked.

Another Injury

Gafoor had received a very low tariff of just 13 years for a grotesque sexually motivated murder and one where he allowed five innocent men to go to prison for his crime – they were in jail for 16 years between them before they had all been freed in 1990 and 1992.

Then, for the next 11 years the case was in limbo until Jeffrey Gafoor was himself brought to justice. He claimed that he had murdered Lynette because he wanted his £30.00 returned and that he wanted to have unprotected sex with her. She refused.

He claims that resulted in him just losing it and committing that grotesque sexually-motivated murder. He never gave a credible explanation of why he murdered Lynette, but still received a remarkably lenient tariff of just 13 years.

Last October the Parole Board decided to hold Gafoor’s sixth hearing. Like all the others the public and media were prevented from attending it. Behind closed doors a panel of the Parole Board decided that Gafoor would be freed – the real murderer of Lynette White was freed earlier this year, despite his continued failure to explain why he committed that murder apart from his claim that he just lost it for no credible reason, even though he had no criminal record, let alone of similar offences, or of mental illness.

Gafoor was released after serving just under 22 years without ever providing a credible motive, if there was one. This meant that the Parole Board, which only had to consider whether it believed the public was likely to be safe if released, decided to free him without having received a credible explanation of why he had killed. How, then, could they think that it would be safe to release him?

Lynette’s Law – Sadly Required

Very, very few people believe his claim about his motive – I certainly don’t and nobody I have asked about it does either. The criminal justice system and various agencies of it has had chance after chance to deliver justice to Lynette and all the other victims of this appalling case. Sadly, it has never done so, and other people have not been protected either despite at least some means to do so – powers that for some unknown reason have not been used.

That was the basis for proposing Lynette’s Law, which essentially says that a murderer, especially a murderer who pleaded guilty, must tell the victim’s family, and in this case, both victims’ families, the victims of the miscarriage of justice as well as the victims of the murder, why he committed the crime and if he doesn’t it should be reflected as an aggravating factor in the tariff and it should also be taken into account in the parole hearing.