John’s wife Carol and daughters Louise and Hannah were murdered in a crime of horrific brutality. Louise’s ex-boyfriend Kyle Clifford raped and shot her with a crossbow. He had already stabbed Carol to death and then shot Hannah when she returned home.
“The screams of hell, Kyle. I can hear them faintly now,” John said in his victim impact statement read to the court. “They’re going to roll the red carpet out for you. At that point, when the person you could have been meets the person you are, you will realise your miserable fate will last for eternity.”
But Clifford was just the latest case in a happy trend for killers and rapists – of refusing to enter the dock for sentencing and to hear testimony from their victims’ loved ones about the consequences of their actions.
John Hunt told the Cambridge Crown Court: “I so wished to deliver these words eye to eye, Kyle.” For surely he must have felt it was his final duty to his dead wife and daughters to tell Clifford what damage he had done – and the failings in his character which caused it.
For we cannot permit a “take it or leave it” justice system. The reason no-shows for sentencing have become a trend is because criminals have seen others taking the easy option not to appear – so they don’t bother either.
And such courtroom avoidance is way more than cowardly – it is another means of exercising control and inflicting pain on those already suffering. It should be punished as such.
But why are not more politicians and members of the criminal justice system calling for this? Why aren’t they demanding that something so obviously, clearly, vividly wrong, is made to face their fate?
Or were you simply thinking: “This is outrageous?”
square ALISON PHILLIPS
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Read MoreThe judge then added: “If the defendant simply lacks the courage to face today, then so be it.”
It seems to me that large swathes of our society – among the lawmakers, the justice system and the media – have lost a sense of moral outrage. Gut responses to bad behaviour have become weighed down and smothered by tediously rational but emotionally unfulfilling arguments. I’m not saying we have lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong – just that we have lost a visceral, emotional anger about it. Perhaps about anything.
Morality stories and morality plays have been within us since time began. They are a force for social cohesion – shaping behaviours and constructing a set of norms around which people can coalesce.
In the 13 years since publication it feels that divergence has only grown wider between the masses who feel that moral outrage and an elite which have scrubbed it from their soul.
Alison Phillips was editor of the Daily Mirror from 2018-24; she won Columnist of the Year at the 2018 National Press Awards
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