Australia’s best selling fish wrapper, The Hun, is in Crusader mode again this week. This time the hot issue is the piss-poor sentences that Victoria’s judges are handing out to “child killers�.
The fun started on Tuesday, with Katie Lapthorne’s report “Baby killer sentence outrage�:
A MINIMUM five-year jail sentence for a father who committed monstrous assaults that killed his baby daughter has been slammed by child welfare groups.
David Scott Arney, 25, repeatedly punched five-month-old Rachael Joy in what he described as “fits of passion”.
After a brief recap of the details of the case, and Arney’s trial, Lapthorne finally gets around to the outrage of those child welfare groups:
Australian Childhood Foundation CEO Joe Tucci said the sentence was grossly inadequate.
“That sentence doesn’t really reflect the severity of the pain and torture that that little girl faced,” Mr Tucci said.
“To only get five to nine years just doesn’t reflect what I think is community expectations around the killing of a child.”
Mr Tucci said the case highlighted the need to remove plea bargaining from child homicide cases.
By my count that’s exactly one child welfare group – perhaps the others were lost in the sub-editing.
Yesterday Lapthorne, with the assistance of Mark Buttler, produced a follow-up article “Tiny Lives Betrayed�:
MORE than a dozen people charged with murdering children in the past decade have struck deals to dramatically reduce their time behind bars.
Families, police and victims’ groups are appalled by the “institutionalised injustice” that lets child killers beat murder charges in favour of manslaughter.
A wave of community outrage over the death of five-month-old Rachael Joy Arney has prompted calls for a review of the law.
In each, the offenders were charged with murder but prosecutors accepted a plea of guilty to manslaughter.
All but one received sentences of less than half the 20-year maximum penalty for manslaughter. Their minimum non-parole jail terms totalled just 64 years.
In developments yesterday:
The Premier Steve Bracks was horrified by the Arney case, an unnamed homicide squad detective was resigned to this sort of thing, Australian Childhood Foundation CEO Joe Tucci (him again) thought the law was letting kids down and a prominent Melbourne barrister (Peter Faris QC) said the decision should be left to the jury. Sounds like Katie and Mark had a busy time on the phones - including a chat with the father of “Jonathan Guiver, 3, who was beaten to death by Mark Mietto in 2001�. Mietto received a minimum four-year jail term and was released this year. Here’s how the conversation is reported:
“A fair penalty? There probably isn’t one,” Mr Guiver said.
“Ten years is what I thought he would have got but nothing could be right for what he’s done.
“A child is defenceless. A child needs the protection of the courts.”
It’s not hard to guess what question they put to Mr Guiver to elicit that answer.
Mark Buttler also found time to put together this report, under his own by-line, on the killing of Dylen Jones by Mark Horsey in 1997:
MICHAEL Jason Horsey detested little Dylen Jones, the son of his de facto wife.
Babysitters testified at the boy’s inquest they saw Horsey hold up a chocolate bar and say to the child: “If I chuck this on the road, will you run after it and get hit by a car?”
The underlying threat became reality on December 15, 1997.
Horsey, tired of Dylen’s grizzling interrupting his TV viewing, struck the boy 10 times to the head, causing fatal injuries.
The killer was given seven years’ jail with a minimum of five after pleading guilty to manslaughter.
Buttler got that last bit wrong – as today’s thrilling installment of the series (“No move on child kill anger� by Norrie Ross) reveals in the final paragraph:
THE Herald Sun reported yesterday that Michael Jason Horsey had pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Dylen Jones in 1997. In fact, Horsey was tried for murder but found guilty of manslaughter by a Supreme Court jury.
Oops! But let’s not have any nitpicking here – if Horsey had the chance, no doubt he would have pleaded guilty to manslaughter, particularly if he thought he’d get off more lightly.
No Crusade is complete without an editorial spelling out the paper’s position, so yesterday The Hun declared the result in the Arney case and the other cases it had found no less than “A travesty of justice�:
THE Herald Sun today reveals a shocking failure in the way the justice system deals with child-killers.
In the past decade at least a dozen men charged with murdering children have escaped their just deserts by pleading guilty to manslaughter.
A Crusade isn’t worth taking on if you can’t get a result so today, with the help of Liberal Party law spokesman Andrew McIntosh, The Hun is putting the heat on the Government (Norrie Ross again):
THE Bracks Government has been accused of ducking its first major issue since being re-elected.
Premier Steve Bracks refused yesterday to consider a change to the law to ensure that child killers don’t get off with light sentences.
…
Attorney-General Rob Hulls initially said it was the job of the Director of Public Prosecutions to appeal against lenient sentences. Later, he said he would ask the DPP, Paul Coghlan, QC, if any changes to the law were needed.
Not bad for three days work – a recently re-elected Government already wriggling on the hook.
Outrageous? No, just a standard, by the numbers, Hun beat-up. And we’ll all be grateful for The Hun’s public spirited stand on this issue when the next “child killer� to turn up in the courts gets what’s really coming to him. Small matter if it’s too late for the dead child in the case, so long as the community is satisfied that the punishment fits the crime.
Elsewhere [by MB]: More commentary from Nick Gruen at Troppo.
um, speaking of beat-ups…
what about the “piss poor” sentencing of people like Andrew Landeryou?
I read it once. No luck. Read it twice. Again no luck. I give up. What exactly is your point, Gummo?
Also, what’s with the scare quotes around ‘child killers’. It’s not controversial that these men killed children, you know.
BBB
I think it’s outrageous that people who kill children ought not receive harsher penalties, and you don’t need to be a member of the Australian Childhood Foundation to share that opinion. I don’t know what motivates someone to beat a child to death for disrupting their nightly viewing, but such motivation does need to be checked. You have focused on sentencing-as-deterrent but you have completely missed the other facet of criminal penalisation, sentencing-as-punishment.
When you can be blithe about actual, documented atrocities like this it makes it hard to attack a real, 100% bullshit beat-up.
So this is what - a 50% bullshit beat-up?
Blithe about actual, documented atrocities? No, Andrew, somewhat cynical about the Hun’s coverage of the issue, which is basically pitched at readers who like a good dose of outrage with their morning coffee.
Outrage is easy, so is whipping up a campaign for tougher sentencing of child-killers (scare quotes optional - I prefer them because it’s the Hun’s emotive phrase, not mine). But the point of the post, for those who missed it is in the last sentence - the Hun’s posturing on this issue will do sod all to prevent future child killings.
The Law reform Commsions of Both VIC and NSW seem to agree that a Baby can provoke.
Under common law and statute law in New South Wales, a person who would otherwise be guilty of murder may have his or her criminal liability reduced to manslaughter if the killing occurred in circumstances of provocation.
….
This implies that the accused person’s conduct is partially excused because of the highly provocative circumstances in which the killing occurred, rather than the killing itself being justified in the circumstances. This would explain a case in which, for example, a baby’s continued crying was held to be capable of amounting to provocation at law.
And this is how they get mansluaghter and this is how they get light sentences.
We had a big discussion about “provocation” in last weeks discussion about Male to Female domestic Violence.
The concensus seemed to be that there was “no excuse never ever” - Fair enough - or do Babys have different rights?
NSW LINK
Well, it should be manslaughter. Getting angry, losing it and killing a child is clearly not as morally culpable as planning and carrying out a cold-blooded killing. That’s just common sense. Whether or not the prevailing sentences for manslaughter are appropriate is another question, mind you.
BBB
I’m more concerned with what happens to our judicial system over time. People are already crying out loud all the time that ‘there is no justice’. There’s always pressure for the politicians to harden up.
Jaysus Max, you just don’t know when to give up, do you?
Naunce, man. Naunce.
As I recall, that discussion was not about the appropriate penalties for domestic violence, but whether an awareness campaign about the most common form of DV is appropriate.
Are YOU arguing here that we shouldn’t talk about child-killers? Of course not - they’re two separate threads, with completely different terms of reference.
This one is about cheap shoddy journalism in ‘outrage campaigns’.
Actually Gummo, what the last sentence says is: once a kid is dead there’s not a lot you can do. I take your point about hype campaigns but better to target them when they are clearly bullshitting.
Loathe as I am to find myself defending the Hun, there IS something wrong when a fully grown man can use all of his considerable strength to brutalise his baby because of the frustrations he feels in his life, and receive such a light sentence.
“Well, it should be manslaughter. Getting angry, losing it and killing a child is clearly not as morally culpable as planning and carrying out a cold-blooded killing”
See, here’s where I see some of the problem - a fully grown adult should know that getting angry and “losing it” with a child or baby could reasonably result in death or serious injury to a child, so the normal rules of manslaughter don’t allow for adequate punishment in these cases.
I don’t think it’s a beat up to point out that the victims of these crimes are vulnerable, tiny, babies and children - and to talk about “provocation” where children were crying, misbehaving etc, is just obscene. I have two children of my own, one of whom spent the formative months of her life crying for no apparant reason, so I know about how a crying child can make you doubt your sanity but WE are the adults, and supposed to know better. There should be damn serious consequences for “losing it” and killing or maiming a child. As it is, you could get a longer sentence for robbing a bank.
The sentences for manslaughter may well be too light and not adequately take into account different kinds of deadly behaviours.
By all means, we should have grades of sentencing in manslaughter cases depending on whether a death is due to accidental negligence, criminal negligence, depraved indifference etc or an enraged frenzy. A person who explodes into frenzied fatal attacks definitely requires a significant custodial sentence for society’s protection (although perhaps in a locked mental ward rather than a gaol).
But without premeditation a deadly attack simply is not murder, no matter how sympathetic the victim, and should never be tried as such.
I couldn’t agree more.
And what’s more, I don’t think they just “should” know, I think they *do* know.
“But without premeditation a deadly attack simply is not murder, no matter how sympathetic the victim, and should never be tried as such”
Most of the attackers in these cases didn’t “just lose it” one time. These are cases of children being used as punching bags again and again and again. When autopsies are perfromed, the children more likely than not have old injuries from previous times dad has “just lost it”. Meaning that it may not be pre-meditated exectly, but it’s also not just one out of character deadly attack.
Its not necessarily about trying for murder anyway, in my opinion. It’s about punishing the manslaughter appropriately. Attacking a child is not the same thing as getting into a fight at the pub and accidentally hitting the other guy too hard, and should be punished more severely. Manslaughter carries a maximum term of 20 years, none of the men in the article received sentences close to that.
20 years and compulsary sterilisation, so they can’t reproduce again and kill another baby.
I think coldblooded premeditated killing is rightly classified as murder and punish accordingly.
but what of “hotblooded” killing.
Is it always manslaughter?
surely its just as dangerous to have a person with a predisposition to violence causing death walking around the streets than a cold blooded calculator?
Ohio.com
Mother in microwave baby case has criminal past
A custodial sentence in this case, should the allegations prove true, is extremely unlikely and will probably result, after the inevitable appeal, in a suspended sentence, counselling and an Oprah TV appearance in sympathy.
We wait and see.
Killing babies - infanticide - is no big deal these days it would seem, especially for mothers. A bad hair day and a bit of depression are all that’s required to walk free.
In the present liberal judicial climate, five years in this case could be seen as a severe sentence.
Sadly, babies just don’t rate these days. I wonder why?
“Killing babies - infanticide - is no big deal these days it would seem, especially for mothers. A bad hair day and a bit of depression are all that’s required to walk free.”
You sir are a buffoon.
Lawlink
Partial Defences to Murder: Provocation and Infanticide
And a recent example -
BBC
Mother spared jail for baby death
Tell that to Andrea Yates.
I do have sympathy for mothers who tragically kill their children in the midst of psychotic episodes. I can’t imagine their anguish when treatment breaks their psychosis and they must face what they have done. Treatment before the psychosis took hold could well have saved the child(ren), but now it never will.
I don’t have the same sympathy for non-psychotic murdering mothers. Or any non-psychotic murderer. Not at all.
Good historical overview from Am J Psychiatry 161:1548-1557, September 2004: Maternal Infanticide Associated With Mental Illness: Prevention and the Promise of Saved Lives
So whats your point Maximus? The children featured in the article all happen to have been killed by men, though there have been one or two high profile cases where it was the mother who killed. like that Kathleen Folbigg (sp?) who was convicted a few years ago of killing her children……I’m sure she’s relaxing on a beach somewhere now isn’t she? Oh no, that’s right, she’s SERVING OUT HER LONG JAIL SENTENCE.
cases of child death by accidental or deliberate methadone poisoning are becoming more frequent - lately we’ve had the mother who stopped resuscitating her baby to have a fag - while the Triple 0 operator was trying to keep her going - she has been charged with either murder or manslaughter re: the methadone poisoning, of which the baby died.
A few years ago, mothers weren’t being charged in cases of extreme neglect and infanticide, but they are being held more to account recently, including in cases where they have stood by and allowed husbands or de-factos to maim/kill the child, and are being charged as accessories etc.
I have no problem with this at all.
gummo, what interventions are you asking for, from DOCs (or whatever the Vic version is called?) which might help to avoid these terrible tragedies?
for anyone’s interest, here is a link to the 2003 report on Fatal Assault and Neglect of Children and Young People by NSW Child Death Review Team
http://www.kids.nsw.gov.au/files/cdrt_fatal_abuse_neglect2003.pdf
(I couldn’t find the 2004/5 report). The Team reports on all cases of child death in NSW. It was through this report this shocking SMH article drew from:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/midnight-in-croydons-garden-of-evil/2006/07/14/1152637872260.html
jo,
At this stage I’m not calling on DOCs for anything - especially not the names of the guilty parties who let these twelve deaths happen. That’s just playing The Hun’s silly game.
I’ve got a new post in the works on the hun campaign (brings out the issues that I’m interested in a little better), so I’ll be closing this thread and discussion can move over there.