We live in fear - felons don’t

Every day our reporters cover every Crown and Magistrates’ Court in our area. Today we bring their findings together in a special report.This unique snapshot of law in action makes fascinating but deeply depressing reading.

Gone are the days when felons lived in fear of the beak. Today’s defendants, assuming they can be bothered to turn up, face a system which bends over backwards not to impose meaningful punishments.

It is frankly astonishing how much court time is taken up dealing with people who fail to comply with earlier orders.

A woman who broke her curfew was sentenced to jail but the sentence was suspended - in effect, no punishment.

When a prison sentence is inevitable, the leniency of some courts - probably the result of too few prison places - offends any sense of natural justice.

A thug who kicked a policeman was jailed for a mere 18 weeks. To add insult to the officer’s injury, this sentence will run concurrently with another spell in jail and is therefore meaningless.

There is no mystery behind today’s jam-packed prisons. It is the direct result of a kid-glove legal system which fails to crack down in the early days of a criminal’s career.

Villains know that they can commit a string of crimes without having to pay a penny, let alone see the inside of a cell.

Is it any wonder that so many offend time after time until finally they commit crimes so heinous that a long spell in prison is the only answer?

We cannot turn the clocks back but as we in England are betrayed on a daily basis by our useless system, who cannot hear today’s news from the Caribbean without just a twinge of envy? A man in the Bahamas who tried to rape an 83-year-old woman has been sentenced to eight strokes with a cat o’ nine tails.

Barbaric? Possibly. But corporal punishment at least introduces an element of fear into the system.

Under the English legal system criminals have nothing to fear. That’s why the rest of us live in fear.

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Politicians - don’t you just love them?

CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown promises to freeze the assets of terror suspects everywhere. And yet under his very nose, the hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza, who owes £250,000 in legal aid, has managed to buy a house for £220,000 - cash.

After 9/11, politicians promised to do whatever it took to prevent a repeat. Yesterday in New York, untroubled by US fighter planes, a light aircraft crashed into a skyscraper. It was an accident but it could have been another 9/11.

Twice in the same day we see the vast gap between what politicians promise and what they actually deliver. And they expect us to trust them?