The murder of three young girls in Southport last July by Axel Rudakubana was an act of extreme savagery and calculated evil. Six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar were victims not only of a brutal killer but also of a system of policing, intelligence and criminal justice which failed at several points: they did not need to die.
Rudakubana pleaded guilty at the beginning of his trial this week to all sixteen charges against him: three counts of murder, ten of attempted murder, one count of possession of a knife, one of ricin production and one terror-related charge. But he showed no remorse, and had told police after his arrest: “I’m glad those kids are dead, it makes me happy” and that he was “so happy, six years old. It’s a good thing they are dead, yeah.”
The case of Axel Rudakubana has exposed many failures, but his sentencing is not one of them
Mr Justice Goose gave Rudakubana 13 life sentences, with a minimum term of 51 years and 190 days. He will therefore not even be eligible for parole until he is 70, but the judge added, “I consider at this time it’s likely he will never be released and will be in custody for all his life”.
The judge was unable to impose a whole life order, which would rule out even that remote possibility, because Rudakubana was 17 at the time of the murders, and whole life orders can only be imposed on those aged 18 or over under the provisions of the Sentencing Act 2020. “Had he been 18,” Goose observed, “I make it clear I would have been compelled to impose on him life imprisonment without a minimum term.”
The political reaction to the sentence has been furious. Rupert Lowe and Lee Anderson of Reform UK called for the reintroduction of the death penalty for cases such as these. The last executions in the United Kingdom were more than 60 years ago and the sanction was finally removed from the statute book in 1998; public support for capital punishment varies, but hovers around 50 per cent. Parliament has consistently voted against such a move, but it remains fundamentally a moral issue, as there is little persuasive evidence of a deterrent effect.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch wants to re-examine the minimum age of 18 for whole life orders. That is intellectually coherent, though the argument additionally made by some, that Rudakubana was “only” nine days short of his 18th birthday at the time of the attack, is not: the law must have clear definitions, and it is inevitable that there will be marginal cases. Statute cannot provide for a minimum age of “18-ish”.
The criminal justice system also treats offenders under 18 in fundamentally different ways: they are sent to young offenders institutions, not prisons; their identities are not disclosed outside court; and court proceedings are different. To allow someone under 18 – a child, under the law of all four UK jurisdictions – to receive a whole life order should be considered in the wider context of youth justice.
The local MP for Southport, Patrick Hurley, adopted a less intelligible approach. He described the 52-year sentence as “not severe enough” and failing to “reflect the crimes committed”, and has called on the attorney general to refer it to the Court of Appeal. Given that a whole life order is not applicable, what would satisfy him? Would 60 years be “severe enough”? 70 years? Rudakubana will almost certainly die in jail.
These competing suggestions hint at a deeper question with which politicians have yet to grapple in a systematic way: what is the purpose of imprisonment? We generally think that criminals are confined for a mixture of reasons including protection of the public, punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation, and the former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke is currently undertaking a review of sentencing in part to address this issue.
The calls for harsher measures in the case of Axel Rudakubana fail to engage with this difficult matrix. Given his lack of remorse and the savagery of his crimes, parole in 2077 seems a remote prospect, so it is not a matter of protection of the public; equally, it is hard to see how the potential imposition of a whole life order would have deterred him. Rehabilitation of a man capable of such unmitigated evil also seems hopeless.
Where does that leave us? Are we seeking more stringent penalties simply as a heavier form of punishment and retribution for his appalling crimes? To what purpose? The shock and anger of the public are wholly understandable, as is the bottomless grief of the bereaved parents, but no custodial sentence, however long, can bring Bebe, Elsie Dot or Alice back; nor, for that matter, would the hangman’s noose.
The case of Axel Rudakubana has exposed many failures, but his sentencing is not one of them. He has been sentenced to one of the longest tariffs ever given by a British court, and will almost certainly never be freed. Parliament may decide that whole life orders should be more widely available, but it has not yet done so. The scandal lies in what preceded the murder of three young girls, not the judicial response. We should not be distracted from that while a killer faces half a century behind bars.
Katy Balls, Isabel Hardman and James Heale discuss the political reaction to the Southport sentencing on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:
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