Wednesday 16 September 2009

Why, Exactly, Should We Keep This Creature Alive…?

An 85-year-old widow was brutally murdered by a drunken thug who broke every bone in her face and robbed her of £350, a court heard yesterday.
Did he have a record as long as your arm?

Don’t they always…
Jobless Robert Tozer, 20, had recently been released from prison when he burgled retired teacher Joan Charlton, whom he had known as a neighbour since childhood.

He repeatedly assaulted her with a bottle in the living room before searching upstairs for cash.
And that wasn’t enough:
Tozer came back downstairs to discover the injured pensioner trying to reach the phone in the hall to call for help and launched a merciless attack.

He stamped on her head, cut the phone line, deactivated the fire alarm and tried to set fire to her body despite knowing she was still alive.
Tell me, why should a creature this depraved still be left sucking oxygen?

Why should he spend the next 22 years eating, drinking and being attended to by pretty prison officers dedicated to 'looking after prisoners with humanity', maybe even arranging to have his every thought published on the Internet, and maybe even, if this campaign succeeds, voting in the next election?
Yesterday Tozer pleaded guilty to murdering Mrs Charlton at her home in West Parade, Hull in June.

He was given a life sentence at Hull Crown Court and told he would serve a minimum of 22 years behind bars.
A ‘minimum of 22 years’..? He should never be released.

In fact, if his last prison sentence had been a proper one, he wouldn’t have been released:
Tozer had been out of jail for less than three weeks when he murdered Mrs Charlton.

He had been serving a 15-month prison sentence for attacking a girlfriend's partner with a pool cue and also had a previous conviction for assaulting a police constable.
How was he caught?

Well, that’s an interesting little footnote:
It became common knowledge in the neighbourhood that he was to blame and was arrested.
Local gossip led to the arrest?

A man with this record, a neighbour of the victim, with his prints on file, wasn’t scooped up the day of the discovery of this crime?

4 comments:

Pavlov's Cat said...

I quite agree with you Julia, there are some crimes where there is obviously no hope of rehabilitation of the offender or are so sickening,as I posted my self a while back Monsters Amongst Us that we need to use the Chinese treatment on them, a 9mm lead pill to the back of the head and send the bill to their family. Everybody wins

JuliaM said...

Laban has some further details on his blog. Needless to say, another prison/probation success story...

Angry Exile said...

JuliaM, as I've argued before there is a good reason for keeping this creature alive, and it's not because I feel the remotest sympathy for him. Having capital punishment necessarily implies entrusting the power of life and death to a group that many generally consider among the most untrustworthy people there are. I'd oppose the death penalty on moral grounds anyway, but far more pressing to me is the big practical problem: the people who'd have the power are the same bastards who have spied on homeowners and dog walkers using laws they said would only be used for terrorism and organised crime, the same bastards who have tried people without a jury and want to lock people up without a fucking trial at all. With that in mind would you really want the death penalty brought back even "only for" for scum like Tozer? Could you really be sure it would stay only for scum like Tozer?
The moral arguments against the death penalty can go hang (see what I did there ;-) ) - I'd be fucking afraid to live in a Britain with capital punishment.

Pavlov's Cat said...

I see you and Laban got a Hat Tip from Ed West In The telegraph for this post , nice one

Another casualty of the liberal justice system