Confirmation of Nottingham killer Valdo Calocane’s cushy hospital sentence cheats families of justice
Justice denied
FOR the families of Valdo Calocane’s victims the pain and trauma will now be unending.
The confirmation of his cushy hospital sentence doesn’t just cheat them of proper justice.
It condemns them to years or even decades of fear that he will be let loose again on our streets — and of needing constant vigilance in order to campaign to prevent it.
Unlikely as it is, his bid for freedom could even begin in just three years.
Appeal judges accepted, like the trial judge, that Calocane’s schizophrenia was solely responsible for his savage, random killings of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates.
Yet, as their families argue, the pre-meditation and chilling preparations for his killing spree give the lie to that.
No one disputes his mental condition.
But a new second-tier murder charge would hand such monsters proper punishment as well as treatment. The Government must consider introducing it.
The Attorney General herself appealed this feeble “manslaughter” sentence.
She is well aware justice has not been done.
We told EU
WHAT began as a trickle is now a flood.
Nineteen of the EU’s 27 members are demanding Brussels starts an “offshoring” scheme for illegal migrants not unlike our own Rwanda strategy.
True, the aim — for now at least — is only to process them abroad, not permanently deport them. But EU officials seem far tougher on asylum seekers than soft-touch Britain.
And, as with Rwanda, the point IS deterrence . . . to “prevent, rather than manage”, as the Italian PM says.
Ireland may need it more than most. It is already deluged by migrants arriving from the UK trying to swerve Rwanda.
And Northern Ireland’s High Court ruling that our scheme won’t apply there will surely invite a new influx — with many of those crossing the border bound for Dublin.
Ireland is clearly up for offshoring.
It has, after all, already tried in vain to offload its migrants back to the UK.
Bar humbug
VOTING to bar MPs from Parliament if they are arrested over sex allegations looks like a mistake.
It is a big step to remove an elected member from the Commons, depriving voters of representation, based not on a charge but an untested accusation which could prove false or even malicious.
Worse still, their voters would not even know about it.
Because the very MPs who backed this new rule also support privacy laws which make it virtually impossible for the Press to identify arrested suspects.
So accused politicians would effectively be barred in secret, perhaps for months and possibly for nothing.
How can that be right?