Well gobear somebody agrees with you.
His mother.
As someone who is very anti-death penalty I find it almost impossible to keep up the arguement in the face of Huntley.
As I say the only consolation is that his life on the beasts’ wing at Belmarsh is about as bad as it gets in the British prison system.
I’m not currently sure about the death penalty myself - I can’t decide whether killing Huntley would amplify or diminish the general fucked-upness of the whole thing.
Huntley was what Huntley was. Anyone want to make a case that the Death Penalty would have prevented the deaths of these two girls ?
Is retribution sufficient reason, fuelled or not by tabloid blood hounding ?
I can’t see it presenting much of a deterrent to other potential offenders either, or at least it doesn’t seem like Huntley would have been deterred by it.
That’s the point isn’t it? He wasn’t mad, he wasn’t off his head on booze/drugs. He wasn’t even emotionally attached to the girls or their families. In other words there are no mitigating factors whatsoever. Nor is there any doubt about his guilt.
Would the death penalty have stopped him? IMHO almost definately not (as I have said the alternative is hardly attractive and surely deterent enough).
Is society entitled to express it’s anger at such a man by killing him? I think not, but it’s hard to keep that feeling up in this case.
Having said all that I think that Carr was rather harshly treated.
It’s curious; during the lead-up to the trial, things were said about Carr’s apparent reference (prior to the discovery of the bodies) to the girls in the past tense, implying that she knew they were dead, but her insistence that she knew nothing about it until the police told her seems to have won the day.
No doubt there were other factors involved, but I do wonder if we know the truth about her involvement…
I suspect part of the reasoning behind Carr’s sentencing was that it wouldn’t be in anyone’s interests for her to be released immediately. Better for all that a few months elapse – and emotions die down somewhat – before she’s free.
She’s almost within the Prison Governors discretion with regard tagging already, and the judge would have weighed all of that.
So, for me, the length of her sentence wasn’t about what she should now serve, but how best to ease her back out into the ‘community’ (setting up a new ID, location, etc,.)
The notion that the death penalty is a deterrent is arrant nonsense.
In countries where the death penalty exists, it is implemented.
Therefore, it does not deter those who live under the legislation which uses it; such people do what they do, in the full knowledge that if they are convicted, their government will sanction their death.
People in countries where there is no death penalty who call for it after cases such as this one are not calling for it as a deterrent, but are calling for it as retribution. I can understand that more readily, from an emotional point of view, but is there any instance of a nation abolishing the death penalty for a given crime and then reinstating it for that crime*?
Can abolition of the death penalty ever be repealed?
*Barring hostile takeovers of once democratic countries by tyrannical extremists - which, let’s be sensible, isn’t going to happen in the UK.
IIRC, several US states reintroduced the death penalty per se in the 80s/90s, having outlawed it in the 60s/70s. What effect this has had on crime is hotly contested.
I tend to agree in Carr’s case. Accepting, as the jury did, that she did not know Huntley was the murderer it seems like she was only really guilty of being stupid rather than any great malice.
To a certain extent she has been tried and found guilty by the media just because of her association with Huntley.
This article …
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3330513.stm
suggests that they are going to do a “Mary Bell” with her.
I could see two scenarios where the death penalty might be reintroduced in Britain:
Expediency - if there was a dramatic increase in the rate of convictions for serious offences (such as this one) and management of the large volume of dangerous prisoners was a genuine problem.
Politics - if the decision was put to referendum (obviously not something that happens at the moment, but if parties and policies changed…) in some sort of pre-election bid to win over the public, and the referendum took place in the wake of a high-profile case such as this one, the public (or at least the significant majority of those sufficiently motivated to attend the polling stations) might vote in favour of it.
My thoughts may be grossly wrong - as has been pointed out, I am not in intimate exposure to the full body of evidence - but I tend to think that Carr may initially have considered Huntley innocent, but then having embarked upon the route of lying for him, dug herself a hole from which no escape route was evident - even if the realisation that he might be guilty started to dawn (before she broke down when the police told her bluntly that he had done it), she would have had to overcome the significant force of psychological denial, plus fear of personal consequences of the lie being uncovered.
I too feel that Carr has been tried and judged by the media, and even feel bad for her that she’s going to have to live with people thinking Maxine Carr = child murderer despite it not actually being her who killing the girls and being nowhere near the place when it happened. The Scum in particular seems to be enjoying a hate campaign.
Yes, she dug herself into a stupid hole by providing Huntley with an alibi. But she’s not a child murderer and shouldn’t be treated as one.
Trouble is (for her) that she’s got quite a distinctive face; re-integrating into society isn’t going to be easy for her.
We will never know for certain the extent of Carr’s knowledge and suspicions. However based on what she said to police she did most certainly know that the man she loved had in the past been accused of rape, for which he was completely exonerated on a watertight alibi.
On the basis of this one can see why she may possibly have decided to lie.
Her mistake was to continue the lie for far too long.
There speaks someone who’s never been to Grimsby! (they have webbed feet too)
I’ll talk about some people in my old job in the past tense. It doesn’t mean I think they’re dead, just that I am unlikely to ever meet them again. They are in my past just like the girls were in Carr’s. She didn’t work in the school anymore.
I reckon Carr’s a nutter, she’d have to be to live with Huntley, and an idiot for believing and lying for him. But not guilty of anything else.
And the death penalty wouldn’t have made one bit of difference to this case. Huntley is a border-line psychopath. So either the possibility of getting caught did not enter into his head at the time or he firmly believed he would always get away with it. Any capital punishment would simply be a matter of revenge, which is a tempting but destructive emotion that should play no part in a judicial system.
I heard on the news today that the cells either side, and the cells above and below Huntley’s are empty and kept locked. Apparantly, he has received death threats from other prisoners, and they think a prisoner may try to burrow into his cell. I think his time in prison will be a more fitting punishment than hanging.
This is a pointless “me too” post - but I really do agree with Futile Gesture there.
There has been talk of facial surgery for Carr to render her less recognisable, but I think this is an idle musing that has been made much of by the media.