As far as this liberal commentator goes, I;d have started by reflecting on the facts.

The paedophile, Craig Sweeney, was given a tariff of 18 years for kidnapping and sexual assault, which means he could apply for parole after five years on account of his having co-operated with the police and entered a guilty plea.

Of course, to make parole after serving his minimum term, he also has to have behaved himself while inside and convince the parole board that he’s not going to be a danger on release, and with two sexual assault convictions on his rap sheet that’s going to be far from easy.

As for Frances Inglis – had I been on the jury in that case then I’ve have been inclined, on what I’ve read, to fight like buggery for a diminished responsibility verdict.

That said, I’d also point out that its precisely because of all the whining about lenient sentences in cases such as Sweeney’s that judges have been shafted with minimum sentences which prevent them exercising a bit of mercy, compassion and discretion in cases like that of Frances Inglis, and handing down a much lighter sentence.

Assuming that there’s no evidence that she’s a danger to the public at large, then this one of those rare instances where even a suspended sentence might have been justified.

@Unity – the Inglis case…phewee…no one wins in this. The connortations are mind boggling. I’m hanging about to see if Archbishop Cranmer may post on it as it’s definately one for his congregation.

Unity – diminshed responsibility for someone who made two attempts to commit the offence with considerable planning and fourteen months between them? You might think that mitigating factors should lead to a lighter sentence, but a claim that she didn’t know what she was doing is unjustified.

He “implicitly supports euthanasia”. Why does this not surprise me? It’s well known his uncle Teddy was a champion of conservation and organic farming. But I have sometimes wondered how his Dad’s good friend John Aspinall might have influenced him. Aspinall was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, an extreme right winger who talked about coups to overthrow Labour goverments in the 1970s. He was also a kind of Malthusian conservationist who considered some animals to be superior to homo homo sapiens. He talked about euthanasia,or sterlisation and it was fairly obvious it was the “lower orders” in mind when he said this (shades of Keith Joseph). He expressed the wish that “3.5 billion people should be wiped out” of the world’s population “within the next 150-200 years” mirroring the views of some extreme Greens. Looks like something of “Aspers” has worn off on Zak.