Maxine Carr did NOT murder two schoolgirls.
She played no role in their deaths.
She could have taken no actions to prevent her deaths.
It is likely - probable - that she did not even know they were dead when she (criminally) stupidly lied to try and help her (later found guilty) partner.
She was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice: not conspiracy to murder, nor murder, nor abduction, nor any charge that would make her a threat in any way to society.
Yet because the fucking red top tabloids have insisted on drawing comparisons with Myra Hindley - placing photos of Myra next to Maxine - the public is baying for her blood. Unbelievably, there is more hatred directed to this poor, stupid young woman than to her murdering, abducting, lying, possibly child-raping ex-partner.
Maxine Carr was stupid. She lied. She has been sentenced. She is NOT dangerous. She is NOT a murderess. She is NOT a child abductor or abuser. She should be let out under the electronic tagging scheme, and the public and the red tops should go back to baying for the blood of actual threats to society, such as paedophiles, abusers, rapists and murderers.
I agree, and i’ve had similar conversations with colleagues. She was stupid to provide a false alibi for her sicko boyfriend, but Hell, if my fiancee came to me saying she was being fitted up with something, and I believed her, i may well do the same myself. I believe she should be treated like any other prisoner. If well behaving prisoners are routinely released early on a tagging system, and she has been well behaved, then she should get the same opportunity.
As for comparing her to Moira Hindley, if i had any respect left for the tabloids id have lost it over this, but the tabloids lost ay regard I had for them looooong ago.
She made a mistake. She got sentenced to prison. She’s done as much of her time as any other prisoner routinely does. Leave her the fuck alone to try to rebuild the sorry ruins of her life. And before the complaints come flooding in about how the families of the victims can’t rebuild their lives, i say this. Maxine Carr didn’t kill anyone, or conspire to kill anyone. She was convicted for giving a false alibi for her lover. FWIW I believe that she thought him innocent when committing this crime. If she had provided an alibi knowing what he’s done things would be different, but that’s not what she was sent down for.
Stupid bint doesn’t deserve the bile that is being directed at her at the moment.
Also to have her early release knocked back for mainly political reasons is quite sickening IMO. Politicians and political reasoning have no place in the sentencing and release of prisoners.
She’ll have to leave the UK for any kind of life after she gets out. The tabloids and the gobshite reactionaries will never leave her alone.
As someone on another messageboard put it, “Says a lot about the mentality of many in this country that a woman (who was over 100 miles from scene of a murder she didn’t know about) can be acquitted by a jury of assisting an offender, then be unable, after serving her sentence, to return to any kind of normal life without fearing random assault.”
I also cannot understand why the Mirror and others haven’t faced defamation charges over those pictures of Myra alongside Maxine, let alone not even been prosecuted for breaching reporting restrictions.
So we no longer judge people by what they have actually done, but by what they are connected to in people’s minds? She was alrady ‘connected indelibly’ with the case before her conviction, were they planning to lock her up even if she had been found not guilty?
Add another to the ‘reasons why David Blunkett is unfit to hold office’ list.
Are you implying that pedophiles can choose to not be attracted to children? Are you implying that pedophiles (nearly all men,) cannot choose not to have sex, whereas abstinent non-pedophiles can? If you do, I find that statement vaguely misandristic.
Eh? You’re saying that paedophiles can’t help themselves, and if anyone disagrees then they’re anti-men? Perhaps I’ve misread your unclear triple negatives. I certainly hope so.
My flamate, a lawyer, is convinced that Maxine Carr knew more than we think and possibly even arranged for those girls to visit her house while she was gone. She says that Carr knew what Huntley was like, and thus should have known not to let him be around children.
I say that all we know for certain is that she was not directly involved in the murders, she was not there, she did not take part, there is no evidence that she was anything other than gullible, and we should act on facts, not prejudice and suppositions.
Nearly everyone can say they’d never commit the same crime as Huntley, but we can’t be so certain that we’d never be as stupid as Carr.
No, I’m saying that the only reason one should be “baying for the blood” of pedophiles is if you don’t believe they can help themselves, and must be imprisoned prophylactically. Saying that is vaguely misandristic, since it claims that everyone, especially men, are basically horn-dogs and are always having sex with something.
If you don’t make the assumption they are not in control, why support imprisoning them for a thought crime?
Who’s ever been imprisoned for a thought crime? Abusing children is not a thought crime. Owning photos of children being abused (and thereby encouraging the abuse) is not a thought crime.
I did hear once of a man who phoned for help, worried that he was thinking about sex with children, and was reported to the police, but AFAIR he was not imprisoned (I can’t find a cite for this one, I’m afraid). Do you have any examples of men being imprisioned for just thinking about sex with children?
You’re the only one making any connection between ‘paedophiles’ and ‘men’ - which is misandrystic.
I do actually believe that everyone has a choice. I believe that anyone intelligent and patient enough to spend months and YEARS grooming a child certainly has a choice not to do anything.
FYI: in the UK, we don’t have the death penalty. “Baying for blood” is a figurative term, it doesn’t specifically mean “calling for the death of” (though many of the British public have and do call for the death penalty for certain offenders). My point was that I would rather they direct their ire - if it must be directed anywhere - towards actual offenders, rather people miles away from the scene of the crime who have been legally acquitted of any involvement in that actual crime.
My problem with Maxine Carr is that she was awarded a shorter sentence than she merited but…
Given that she has complied with the rules upon being sentenced, and that her case came up to the parole board in the normal way, she should be given the same treatment any other prisoner could expect.
The reason I think her offence was more serious than might seem to some, was that for the first few days certainly, the police had some hope of finding the children alive.
The police were not to know that they were already dead, but it is an established fact that in missing persons cases, where there is fear of abduction, time is absolutely of the essence, as far as the police were concerned those kids were alive, and given the condition of the bodies which makes it impossible to finger the time of death, it is possible they were alive and the police might just have had a chance.
Maxine Carr in her lying might well have destroyed that chance.
Her deliberate misdirection of the police gave Huntley time to attempt to dispose of the evidence, and had he been competant, the bodies might never have been found, and other evidence destroyed. Huntley might never have been convicted.
She made a decision to misdirect the police because she might have believed Huntley, it was not her decision to make.
She made a mistake in backing a killer? the choice was hers and the court made the wrong choice in her sentence too.
I also wonder why Huntley was not convicted of other child abuse crimes, there were enough allegations against him, is it just possible that she provided the alibi in other situations ?
It seems to me she has not yet fully answered all the questions worthy of posing to her.
Casdave – I don’t understand your post at all. The police, the jury and the judge all accepted that Maxine Carr believed Huntley’s version until the physical evidence contradicted his story - that’s actual evidence. Why ? Because she believed in him, the man she loved, the possible father of her children, etc, etc.
And that actual physical evidence wasn’t revealed to her until after she’d been arrested – it was the fingerprints on the bin bag containing the girls clothing, I believe.
Funny old world, but not many of us tend to think we live with a double child murderer, especially if we live and love them.
She didn’t lie to put the police off the scent; she lied to protect an innocent man – at least as far as she was concerned at the time. From her point of view, she was actually helping the police by not letting them get distracted by the unfortunate circs pointing to her boyfriend; they could carry on looking for the real abductor.
But like SciFi Sam’s flatmate should be able to confirm, none of us know very much at all unless we’re there in the (court) room seeing, sensing, watching the witness under pressure. That’s how the tabloids get away with this crap; people think they make better judgements by reading the comics and the selective reports.
I didn’t say anyone has been…it apparently is being supported, like my actual quote says, by the OP. Even if you think “pedophiles” could possibly mean the slang construction of “child molesters”, this interpretation is rendered questionable by the phrase “paedophiles, abusers, rapists…”…umm, if istara MEANT to say (which was not said) “child molesters” instead of “pedophiles”, doesnt the list “Child molesters, abusers, rapists…” seem a bit redundant.??? This leads me to believe that it was meant in a more generic sense.