In 42 months’ time we will be at the start of yet another summer that Andrew Clarke will never see. That’s the amount of time the law has decided Mr Clarke’s killer Demiesh Williams, convicted of manslaughter, should spend in custody before being released on license. Our sentencing guidelines and the judge interpreting them have failed to deliver justice that is recognisable to many people outraged at that leniency. That is a dangerous place to be in an already low-trust society.
The facts are that Mr Clarke and Williams got involved in an altercation at a south east London Sainsbury’s in March this year after Williams pushed into a queue in front of him. The location and context could not be more banal in contrast to the devastation that followed. Williams left the store, put on a balaclava, waited for his victim to emerge and smashed Mr Clarke in the face with such force that he fell to the ground suffering a ‘catastrophic’ brain injury from which he did not recover. He then fled the scene. You might say Andrew Clarke was executed for the crime of standing in line. There’s a bigger metaphor in there.
Mr Clarke is yet another statistic of a sentencing regime that has become detached from reality
There is clear and unambiguous pre-meditation in this act. Williams determined to do violence to Mr Clarke for no defensible reason save his own pique at being told to behave in a civilised way. He left the store and put on a head covering, presumably in a futile attempt to disguise himself and re-entered with the intent to teach Mr Clarke a lesson about his selfish entitlement. The media is saturated with warnings about the potential lethality of ‘one punch’ attacks. The graveyards are full of awful examples of what happens when someone is struck on the head and falls to a hard surface. There is no excuse in the world that would condone, explain or excuse these actions – at worst murderous, at best showing a cowardly, calculated and depraved indifference to the consequences.
Mr Clarke is yet another statistic of a sentencing regime that seems to have become detached from reality, where retribution is eternally in the back seat to the drivers of cultural relativism, prison space and suicidal empathy. ‘This could have been any of us’ has fallen apart in an era of widespread criminal impunity. The range of custody available to His Honour Judge Andrew Lees, who had promised Williams a ‘lengthy’ sentence for this offence, was one year to life, before discounts are applied. For Williams, these included an early guilty plea for manslaughter (after a charge of murder was dropped), his employed status as a bus driver and no previous criminal record. He was also a family man.
Let’s consider the impact of Williams’s lethal cowardice on the family of Mr Clarke, who the judge hailed as ‘a hard-working family man’ but nevertheless was only worth a total sentence of five years and three months. His 14-year-old daughter said that Williams had ‘destroyed’ her family in the ‘cruellest way possible’. She said, ‘I don’t want to live my life without’ her ‘best friend.’ His wife said in an impact statement read to the court, ‘What type of man chooses to kill rather than simply walking away? You are a coward. You are a killer. You are a monster.’
Legal purists will insist that justice must be blind and if a judge uses his or her expertise to decide the complex interaction between culpability, aggravation and mitigation that’s enough for the rest of us. We are lectured by academic lawyers and others in the legal profession that we have the best judiciary in the world and any attack on them has near civilisational consequences. I have no doubt that we have very competent and conscientious judges and I hope never to have to test that faith personally. But they cannot and must not be beyond reproach. Recent examples of bafflingly lenient sentences abound. They put strain on an already threadbare contract between the state and the governed. That contract assumes that the state in the form of the Crown will prosecute crimes against individuals and deliver revenge on behalf of society against wrongdoing. It is a bulwark against vigilantism if nothing else. If the state is seen to be failing to keep its promise to citizens, moreover, if retribution and deterrence fall out of fashion, we are heading for the rocks.
The shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has called the sentence ‘paltry’. He’s right and I hope he or others will ask the government to use the unduly lenient sentence mechanism to have this sentence increased. It will not bring poor Mr Clarke back or probably do any good to Demiesh Williams, who will spend his nugatory time behind bars in places awash with disorder and drugs where rehabilitation is a fantasy. But if we are saying that the slaying of an innocent man waiting to buy his family dinner in a supermarket is worth not much more than you’d get for an intemperate tweet online, the law is indeed broken.
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