Recently in Crime & Punishment Category

I can't tell you the last time that I was so upset by a news story but earlier I just couldn't stand to watch another report on the sentencing of that pathetic individual called Luke McCormick. The former footballer was given nearly 7½ years for killing two boys and paralysing their father when he lost control of his car and ploughed into theirs, knocking it down an embankment and into several trees. McCormick was sleep deprived and blind drunk after going out on a bender and ignored advice to not drive.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, if you willingly take a life, then you should lose your own. That McCormick should be banged up for life, not a paltry seven years and four months, with the possibility of parole in 3½ years.

Poor little Arron Peak, 10 and his brother Ben, 8, won't be coming back and their father Phil may never physically recover from his own horrific injuries. Now wife Amanda will have to bear the brunt of not only her sons' murders but her husband's near total dependence on her after sustaining broken vertebrae, lung damage and a crushed spine.

Not only should McCormick be jailed for life, but his bank account should be emptied and his assets sold to pay for Phil's medical care. If the law wants to drive down crime, they should start dishing out proper sentences.

I think that the presiding judge should join McCormick in the clink for contributing to
the number of pathetic sentences handed out to evil criminals.

I wonder how many of you were as sickened as I was by convicted murderer Mark Dixie's pathetic defence that he didn't kill model Sally Anne Bowman but that he 'only' had sex with her dead body?

I am so glad that this 'person' has been sent down for 34 years - though it should have been longer. Killing someone in cold blood is bad enough but to sexually violate them afterward is lower than animalistic behaviour, truly evil.

It's cases like this, plus that of Suffolk's prostitute-murdering psycho Steve Wright, which are making me think long and hard about whether the death penalty should be brought back in cases that are as clear-cut as these.

The government has been banging on about being tough on crime for so long and it's high time they backed up the rhetoric with some swift action. Just listen to/ read the comments of Helen Newlove, who has called for the 'frying' of the three thugs who kicked her husband to death last summer.

Recognise this as a by-product of the authorities' wholesale failure to adequately punish lawbreakers - more and more normally rational people, yours truly included, are contemplating the death penalty is the only real solution.

Am I over-reacting or voicing a common view?