DANIEL PELKA : A CHILD OF OUR TIMES ?

While the Americans get their kicks from shooting people, it seems that the British get theirs from the abuse and murder of children.

 

Despite the repeated promises of the past, another small child has been killed and now an inquiry has determined that everyone failed and yet no one was specifically to blame; it says that "critical lessons" must be "translated into action", whatever such gobbledygook might mean in practice.

 

The child, Daniel Pelka, aged 4, suffered what is described as terrifying and dreadful abuse by his mother and her partner and yet no one appears to have either noticed or done anything about it. He was starved and beaten for months until he finally died at his Coventry home in March 2012.

 

The family apparently had contact with an assortment of state bodies including the police, social services and education services and yet no one noticed what was going on. The child is reported to have been seen scavenging for food in dustbins, and yet no one did anything about it.

 

Year after year, we hear of similar instances and, every time, we are told that lessons must be, and will be, learned and that such things must never be allowed to happen again; year after year they do. The utter incompetence of the services that are supposed to safeguard children is mind-blowing; they react to every instance by trying to impose ever greater security while actually doing nothing. They lock school gates and doors, impose meaningless and time wasting 'CRB' checks and impose photography bans on parents.

 

In the meantime, children like Daniel Pelka continued to be abused and murdered.

COURTS MAKE NONSENSICAL DECISIONS : GEORGE, BAMBER et al.

I've always thought that as one gets older, the world should become more understandable. It seems I have been wrong.

 

Today, the Appeal Court has upheld a previous ruling and denied Barry George compensation for his wrongful conviction on the charge of murdering the broadcaster, Jill Dando, in 1999. Mr George was convicted on the flimsiest of evidence and subsequently spent 8 years in prison before the conviction was quashed. How any court can rule that the clear destruction of his life as a result of this wrongful verdict is not worthy of compensation defeats me.

 

Separately, the European Court of Human Rights has also been at it again. This time, they've decided that imprisoning anyone for a life sentence without the prospect of release is a breach of their human rights. Three convicted murderers had taken their cases to this ludicrous court and the ruling is that there must be a possibility of release and review of the sentences handed down. Why they came to this decision and what it actually has to do with 'human rights' I have no idea.

 

The killers concerned did not consider the human rights of their victims when they murdered them, 5 of them in the case of one of the appellants, Jeremy Bamber; Bamber actually claims that he's innocent, but that's a different matter. In killing their prey, these killers deprived them of life without any prospect of an appeal or a return to life; in days gone by, the death penalty was rightly employed as a mechanism for delivering true justice to such evil people and, in abandoning this ultimate sanction, its replacement was supposed to be a mandatory whole-life sentence. Gradually, this approach has been whittled down so that many murderers now serve little more than 10 years, while their victims corpses rot away and their families and friends mourn for decades.

 

Today's decision by the ECHR flies in the face of all logic and humanity. It places the rights of vicious and cold-hearted killers above those of their victims, families and friends. The sooner this country separates itself from the insane nonsense that emanates from this unbelievably ridiculous body, the better.

KNOX, KERCHER AND MURDER IN PERUGIA.

The appearance of Amanda Knox on television, professing her innocence of the brutal murder Meredith Kercher while also advertising a book which will undoubtedly make her many millions of dollars, is one of the more grotesque things to have appeared on our screens in recent years.

 

Knox was originally convicted of the November 2007 murder and spent 4 years in an Italian prison before being released when judges in the Italian Court of Appeal decided that there was insufficient hard evidence to support a conviction. Since then, the case has been reviewed by the Italian Supreme Court which has overturned the decision of the Court of Appeal and ruled that the appeal should be re-heard.

 

During all of this, the Knox family has used every means at its disposal to proclaim their daughter's innocence, appearing in the media and on television whenever possible. From their point of view, Amanda Knox is an ill-treated innocent. The victim's family, on the other hand, have been almost unheard, maintaining a dignified silence. Unsurprisingly, American opinion is squarely behind Knox, while British opinion tends towards the Kerchers; apparently, in Italy the general view is that Knox and her co-accused are as guilty as hell.

 

Whatever the truth, the snivelling performance of Knox on our television screens and the fortune she will be making from her book which, incidently, is said to bring nothing new to the story, say little for her or her family. Knox seems to have used the situation to her own financial advantage and the murder of her erstwhile friend has become little more than an adjunct to a much broader story.

 

We have yet to learn when the appeal will be re-heard but we can be sure it will be headline news with Knox making capital from it regardless of the outcome.

TIA LET DOWN BY FAMILY AND INCOMPETENT POLICE.

The shocking mess that the police seem to have made of their investigation into the disappearance of a 12 year old girl in Surrey makes one wonder what was going on.

When children go missing, the usual starting point is with the parents and other close family members. In this case and for some as yet undiscovered reason, the police actually did start in the right place but failed to draw the right conclusions; it was only after a return to the starting point and a second bite of the cherry that they found the girl's body, apparently hidden in the house which they had 'thoroughly searched' only a few days before.

Having got it so wrong, the police have now charged the boyfriend of Tia Sharps's grandmother, a relationship which itself raises questions in one's mind' with the murder of this poor child. This sounds like yet another dysfunctional family - while we have heard much of Tia's 46 year old grandmother, her parents have been invisible, at least in my reading of the story. This story also has echoes of the recent tragedy in Derbyshire in which several children were burnt to death in a housefire started by their own family; once again, we have seen tearful and apparently heartfelt television appeals for information from the perpetrators of these horrific acts.

Whatever story eventually comes out, a 12 year old child is dead, murdered by someone close and whom she trusted and let down by her blood family. After death, she was also let down by the police, at least partly because they're too stretched chasing people for a whole variety of minor 'social crimes'

and simply unable to apply the highest and most rigorous standards to the most important crimes.