Judges should not be softer on criminals for being constitutionally rather than calculatedly dangerous
Sometimes, it’s the little details in reportage that affect you. You can be reading about terrible crimes and disasters more or less soberly, and one aside brings home its sheer awfulness.
It’s horrifying enough that three teenagers burned 76-year-old widower Robert Price to death, for example, by throwing a firework through his window. What really got to me, though, was reading about the “high-pitched laughing as the group [ran] away”.
What can you do with people who think that it is funny to set fire to an old man’s house?
Make no mistake: the group meant to hurt Mr Price. 18-year-old Nathan Otitodilchukwu was heard on a ring camera saying that they were going to “f***ing torch this n****r”. Apparently, Mr Price, who had a “lack of social skills and poor hearing”, had faced a long campaign of harassment. He was at the point where he never went outside. On the day that he was killed, his windows were boarded up because a brick had been put through them three days before.
What were the police doing about this? I think we should be told.
Otitodilchukwu has been convicted of manslaughter and has received six years in prison. He will be out when he is 24, if not earlier, and with his whole adult life ahead of him. Mr Price, on the other hand, has no life ahead of him whatsoever — and he must have had an extremely painful death.
It is interesting to read what the judge in the case appears to have considered to be mitigating factors. Otitodilchukwu, said Judge Rebecca Trowler KC, had “poor impulse control” and a “lack of appreciation of the impact on others”.
Before the Secret Barrister sticks his nose in with one of his interminable point-missing explainers, I’m not going to claim that Judge Trowler is technically wrong to consider these to be mitigating factors. But I don’t think that they should be.
If someone has poor impulse control and lacks appreciation of the impact of their actions on other people, that sounds like an argument for keeping them in jail for longer. Perhaps it makes them less morally culpable — but prison is not just about punishing people but incapacitating them. Quite simply, it keeps dangerous people away from people who are not dangerous.
A crocodile is really not morally culpable if it eats a human being, and that is not an argument for allowing it to waddle up the high street. It makes us more keen to keep it out of our communities. (And a crocodile, unlike Mr Price’s killers, would not pose a major threat to people in their own homes.)
Killing Mr Price, by the way, was not an inexplicable moment of madness for Mr Otitodilchukwu. He was convicted of possessing a bladed article in September 2023, and he was convicted of possessing a bladed article in March 2024. When he killed Mr Price, he was subject to a youth rehabilitation order (which sounds like it was going marvellously).
Despite being a dangerous and disgraceful man, though, Mr Otitodilchukwu is actually more sensible than the British legal system on one point. “I’m going to do 20 years in jail,” he said to a support worker on the evening of the crime. Well, he won’t. He won’t even do a third of that. But he did at least have a sense of the proper consequences of deliberately starting a fire that kills a man. This is more than can be said for the judge who sentenced him.
