Law and justice go separate ways

Repeat after me: Five years. Out in three. For murder. Have you done so? Good. Now you know what the title above means.

Every now and then, a trial makes the papers, with the sentence generally described as derisory. Such criticism is more frequent in the more conservative papers, but this time around even they don’t seem able to grasp the slap in the face of justice delivered yesterday.

The circumstances of the case are as follows. Andrew Clark, 43, was queuing up at a supermarket in Beckenham, a rather insalubrious part of London. Damiesh Williams, 30, tried to barge in in front of him, and an argument ensued.

Williams went out to his car, put on a mask (reports describe it as a “face covering”, which does sound like a mask to me), walked back into the supermarket, approached Mr Clark, shouted “I f***ing told you to apologise!” and delivered an open-palmed slap on the side of Mr Clark’s head.

The latter fell down, cracked his head on the floor and died three days later in hospital. His murderer was arrested, but there was no necessity for a trial. Williams’s defence managed to plea bargain the charge down to manslaughter, which put the judge on centre stage.

In the English Common Law, a judge has no sentencing latitude when a defendant is found guilty of murder. The sentence of life without parole is mandatory.

But sentencing for manslaughter is at the judge’s discretion. And the judge in this case sentenced Williams to five years and three months, of which he’ll serve two thirds if he qualifies for the early release scheme.

When announcing his ruling, M’lud generously described Mr Clark as “a hard-working family man”. He thus followed a more or less recent tradition that in itself is a travesty of justice. The implication seems to be that, had the victim been an idle bachelor and a cad, his killer’s crime would somehow have been less heinous.

Yet one regularly has to suppress the emetic impulse when hearing yet another victim described as a prince among men much loved by everyone who ever came in contact with him. This appears to rate the value of human lives according to some implicit classification table, which isn’t the job of jurisprudence.

A trial of a thug who wantonly killed a stranger is there to punish the killer, communicating to society that a human life has a transcendent value and hence is unviolable. In the eyes of the law, the personality of the victim shouldn’t matter – the sentencing judge is duty-bound to pronounce a punishment commensurate with the crime.

Any sensible person will know that in this case justice wasn’t so much served as raped. I wonder how the defence barrister framed his argument, what kind of mitigating arguments he found.

In the absence of a transcript, I can only guess, but a few things are evident. In our law, manslaughter can be voluntary or involuntary.

The difference is the presence or absence of what jurists call mens rea (guilty mind), meaning pre-meditation, the intention to kill. The English concept of pre-meditation differs from the US equivalent in its timeframe. In the US pre-meditation implies a longer and more laborious preparation, whereas in England even a murder conceived a minute before the act is seen as pre-meditated.

Voluntary manslaughter, intentional killing, doesn’t seem to be different from murder, but the latter can be argued down to the former on the basis of diminished responsibility, suicide pact or loss of control.

I find that last one quite baffling: the killer is supposed to rate a lesser sentence because he ‘lost it’, in the parlance of the classes who tend to commit most murders. I would treat ‘losing it’ as an aggravating, not extenuating, circumstance, but I’m sure I must be missing some fine points.

Anyway, voluntary manslaughter typically draws a life sentence in English courts. However, unlike in murder cases, this usually comes with a ‘tariff’, so many years off for good behaviour.

Hence, any judge sentencing a defendant to just five years for voluntary manslaughter would be drummed out of the profession. Therefore, Williams’s case must have been plea bargained down to involuntary manslaughter.

I find the whole concept of plea bargaining to be immoral. I appreciate the need to reduce the heavy workload at our courts and also prison overcrowding, but this isn’t a legitimate reason to play fast and loose with justice.

Defending the people from enemies foreign and domestic is after all the principal function of the state. Thus only one criterion ought to be applied to the allocations for law enforcement and defence: as much as it takes.

Compiling a budget, any responsible government must allocate any amount it takes to protect its citizens and only then see what’s left for other items on the list. If we need more courts, they must be instituted; if we need more prisons, they must be built.

But please shake me out of my reverie: my imagination is running away with me. Our governments aren’t out to protect the Clarks of this world. Their first, non-negotiable expenditure item is welfare for the Williamses of this world.

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Williams’s barrister argued that his killing of Mr Clark was involuntary manslaughter. Was it because Williams delivered a slap and not a punch?

Take it from someone who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks (in Russia, that is): an open-palmed slap on the side of the head is one of the premier blows in the repertoire of violence. It can be delivered at maximum force with little backswing and without any risk of damage to the striking hand.

Any hard blow to the head, especially a side of it, creates cerebral displacement and a risk of serious brain damage. If the blow knocks the man out, he can’t control his fall and is likely to bang his head hard, which increases the risk of fatal trauma.

Since Williams went to his car and took the trouble to cover his face before going back to hit Mr Clark, the act was indisputably pre-meditated. I suspect a good barrister would be able to argue that the intention was to strike but not to kill, yet this should only work to reduce the charge to voluntary manslaughter.

We are clearly looking at a miscarriage of justice: the value of Mr Clark’s life was established at a derisory three years in the slammer. But I’m not surprised, and neither I’m sure are you.

Any modern state looks out for number one first, which is itself and not its citizens. That’s why our state punishes surely and severely any acts it perceives as damaging to its glossocratic ethos: things like transphobia, rape (loosely defined), racism, global warming denial and so on.

Crimes against the individual are treated with greater lenience, relative to their severity: they don’t threaten the state, especially if the perpetrator is a minority race pauper, sponging on the Treasury. Such a person is what the Bolsheviks called ‘socially close’, whose feelings must be protected and whose crimes may be blamed on society.

I wonder how the same judge would have seen the case if the roles had been reversed: Mr Clark killing Mr Williams. But I’d better shut up now: even asking such a question may get me in trouble, and I’d rather not share a prison cell with Mr Williams.