Let’s Help Crime Victims and Families More
This excellent article was written from an American perspective, but it is applicable everywhere. We spend fortunes on punishing offenders and not enough on the one hand providing services such as mental health care to stop them offending in the first place and also to provde real support to victims and their families. All we do is get more vindictive and cut services in the place where they might make a difference. If we take Derick Bird, who so callously murdered 14 in Cumbria, was enough done to check he was the right person to have a gun licence and also did he get the mental heath care that he probably needed. My GP worries about me, because I’ve lost my wife to cancer and can I cope with that and my strokes.
For those in favour of the death penalty, just think what difference it would have made to the Bird case. It would not have deterred him from killing and as he killed himself, it wouldn’t have made any difference afterwards except to give a ghoulish pleasure to the tabloids.
If we retain the death penalty, we are just as inhumane as the likes of Bird.
Years ago, I met Jimmy O’Connor, who had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. But he was repreived and later married the barrister, Nemone Lethbridge. He became a successful playwright and probably did more good in his later life. Do read the story of Jimmy O’Connor’s life in Wikipedia.
Where did I meet Jimmy? At a children’s birthday party in Notting Hill. Whether it was one of his kids, I don’t remember.
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The Anonymous Widower 
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