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‘I am bored and it was something to do’
Gary Vintner, Ian McLoughlin and Lee Newell
The courts of England and Wales have been struggling with the issue of the morality of whole life sentences for murder since 2003, when the Criminal Justice Act formalised their use by the judiciary in the wake of Parliament’s decision to remove the power to instate them from politicians and, in particular, from the Home Secretary.
In Scotland, the law was changed in 2001 to ensure that a fixed minimum period should be the case whenever a life sentence was imposed – to bring Scottish law into line with the European Convention on Human Rights. That is certainly not the position in England and Wales.
In the past few years the struggle in England and Wales has become increasingly intense, with three convicted murderers sentenced to whole life terms – Douglas Vinter, Jeremy Bamber and Peter Moore – conducting a battle against them in the European Court of Human Rights.
Meanwhile, two others, Ian McLoughlin, who was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum period of forty years, and Lee Newell, who had a whole life sentence, took their appeal to the Court of Appeal in England and Wales. These two sets of appeals encapsulate the arguments over whether life should mean life.
Let us begin with Vinter, Bamber and Moore, who are particularly critical of whole life terms. Vinter, who is now in his early forties, cannot accept being locked up until he dies, irrespective of his behaviour or remorse.
‘I’m young and fit,’ he said in 2012, ‘and I’ve maybe got another fifty years of life as a category A prisoner. Torture every single day. I actually pray for a heart attack or cancer.’
In another letter in 2012, Vinter also pointed out the irony that his whole life sentence meant that he could commit any offence whatever – including murder – while in prison as there is no further punishment available to the courts to deter him.
‘I was involved in a stabbing (not fatal) on the wing,’ Vinter explained. ‘You see how I can admit in a letter to an offence as serious as that. It’s because the judge when he sentenced me to natural life gave me an invisible licence that said I can breach any laws I want, no matter how serious, and the law can’t touch me. I’m above the law. I said to the governor, don’t waste any money on investigations, just give me another life sentence for my collection. They don’t mean anything any more.’
Not long after he wrote that letter Vinter offended again – stabbing convicted paedophile Roy Whiting in both eyes, using a sharpened plastic toilet brush handle. Whiting was himself serving a whole life sentence at the time for the murder of eight-year-old Sussex schoolgirl Sarah Payne.
After being tried for the attack, Vinter was given an indefinite sentence with a five-year minimum term to serve in addition to his whole life sentence. There could hardly have been a better example of what Vinter called his ‘invisible licence’ to break any laws he chose. The further sentence was irrelevant to a man already destined to spend the rest of his life in jail.
No one would describe Douglas Gary Vinter, usually known as Gary, as being an innocent or good man. Born in 1970 in Middlesbrough, he is six feet seven inches tall, powerfully built, and given to misusing anabolic steroids. He also has a record of exceptionally violent behaviour. He committed his first murder in August 1995, when he brutally stabbed and killed fellow railway worker Carl Edon, aged twenty-two, in a trackside railway workers’ cabin near Middlesbrough. Covered in blood, Vinter then drove to a local police station and gave himself up. He had stabbed Edon, who had one child and was expecting another with his girlfriend Michelle at the time of his death, no fewer than thirty-seven times. The police found Edon’s body with the knife still embedded in it.
When he was interviewed by the police Vinter formally denied committing the murder, but he accepted responsibility even though he said he ‘could not remember what happened’. But the jury at Teesside Crown Court convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to life in 1996. The Home Office then ordered that he should serve a minimum of ten years and he was released in August 2005 having been on remand since Edon’s murder was committed.
In the last two years of that life sentence, Vinter struck up a relationship with a young woman named Anne White, then in her thirties, whom he had met during a series of ‘home visits’ from prison prior to his intended release. They moved in together in Eston, near Middlesbrough, some distance from his former hunting grounds, and married in July 2006.
Even the move to another part of Teesside did not quell Vinter’s appetite for violence, however. On New Year’s Eve 2006, just a few months after his marriage, he was arrested after a brawl outside a local pub. By that time he had started beating his new wife, and shortly after the New Year they separated, but were later reconciled.
In July 2007, however, Vinter was recalled to jail for six months after being convicted of affray at the pub brawl on New Year’s Eve, thereby breaching his right to freedom.
Anne, who had four children by previous relationships, still suffered severely when he was at home with her, and friends became deeply concerned that his abuse of her was escalating dramatically, while also realising that she was ‘afraid’ to leave him.
Nevertheless, Vinter behaved impeccably in prison, becoming a ‘model prisoner’. Suitably impressed, the Parole Board recommended his second release in December 2007.
At the very beginning of February 2008, just a few weeks after his re-release from prison, he moved out of the family home after yet another violent argument with his wife Anne. Vinter smashed the television set and confiscated her passport – presumably so that she could never escape him.
The couple remained apart for the ensuing few days, but on the evening of 10 February, Vinter spotted her on a night out in central Middlesbrough with friends and once again turned to extreme violence. He grabbed her and bundled her into his car. He drove his terrified wife, then aged forty, to his mother’s house in Middlesbrough, and repeatedly attacked her over a period of half an hour– an attack which finally ended with her brutal murder.
Vinter tried to strangle Anne with his bare hands, before losing his temper and stabbing her four times with two knives, one wound piercing her heart. He then strangled her again, this time driving the life out of his innocent wife’s dying body. He left her lifeless corpse on his mother’s kitchen floor.
Armed police arrested him in the early hours of the following morning, using two baton rounds to subdue the six-foot-seven-inch bodybuilder. Vinter offered no excuse for the killing, beyond telling the police, ‘Right, my name is Gary Vinter. I am solely responsible for the death of my wife. There’s nobody else involved, just me. That’s all I’m prepared to say.’
Shortly after he was charged, Vinter pleaded guilty to murder and, passing sentence, the Recorder of Middlesbrough, Judge Peter Fox QC, told him, ‘The extreme violence which you used is described as continuing … You therefore fall into that small category of people who should be deprived permanently of their liberty. I therefore pass a whole life sentence.’
For his part, Vinter sneered at the White family in the courtroom around him, and smirked as he pleaded guilty.
As the local newspaper put it: ‘With tears and disgust, Ms White’s loved ones were asked to try and control their emotions.’ That did not prove easy, and Anne White’s father Jim, aged seventy-one, asked reporters outside the court after Vinter had been taken to the cells, ‘Why was this convicted murderer allowed to walk free last Christmas?’
By way of explanation, the Parole Board extended its ‘deepest sympathies’ to Ms White’s family and announced that it would be reviewing the case ‘in order to identify learning points for the future’.
The murder of Anne White had a catastrophic effect on her family. Her father died of cancer a year after her death. His wife, Anne’s mother Peggy White, said later, ‘We have often said that he died of a broken heart.’ Sixty-eight-year-old Mrs White also maintained that Vinter should have been hanged. ‘What about Anne’s children, my grandchildren?’ she asked after his second life sentence. ‘What about Mrs Edon, what about their human rights? He can never be released. He would kill again. They should throw away the key. I think people in his category should really be hanged.’
Michelle Edon, who had changed her surname to Carl’s by deed poll following the death of her late fiancée, felt every bit as strongly, saying, ‘I hope Gary Vinter suffers and rots in hell.’ She added, ‘I want to hear that he is dead. I hope one day to hear those words. I want him to suffer like he has made us suffer.’ Her mother agreed: ‘We will never understand why he was released from prison. He stabbed someone thirty-seven times – how could anyone think it is OK to let him back into society? And then he took someone else’s life. Ruined more lives.’
It is a tragic fact that no fewer than thirty-eight of the sixty or so individuals serving whole life sentences in England and Wales killed after being released from fixed term sentences – though that has never been officially confirmed. The delicate question of releasing a man already convicted of a murder so that he can kill again lies close to the heart of the debate about whether or not life should mean life.
Douglas Vinter clearly does not believe that it should. In June 2009 he appealed against his whole life term to the Court of Appeal, but was turned down. Undeterred, in 2011, Vinter joined forces with convicted-murderer-of-five Jeremy Bamber and convicted-murderer-of-four Peter Moore – both of whom were also serving whole life sentences – to petition the European Court of Human Rights that their sentences breached Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights which gives protection against ‘inhuman or degrading treatment’.
In January 2012 the three lost their petition by four judges to three, the European Court deciding that the sentences did not breach their human rights. The then Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke QC, made an impassioned plea to the Court, saying, ‘There will always be a small number of prisoners whose crimes are so appalling that the judges rule that they should never become eligible for parole.’ The European Court, presided over at that time by the British judge, Sir Nicolas Bratza, agreed.
As the Guardian newspaper commented, the European Court’s decision was a little out of character for Sir Nicolas, because three years earlier he had argued in the Court against whole life terms. ‘I consider,’ he said then, ‘that the time has come when the Court should clearly affirm that the imposition of an irreducible life sentence, even on an adult offender, is in principle inconsistent with Article Three of the Convention.’
Perhaps with that contradiction in mind, in December 2012 Vinter, Bamber and Moore launched an appeal against the European Court’s decision. Their petition had been heard by the First Chamber of the Court, but the appeal would be heard by the more important Grand Chamber, who had granted a rare appeal.
This time the three killers won their appeal. On 9 July 2013, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the whole life tariffs given to Vinter, Bamber and Moore did indeed breach their human rights. The problem, the Grand Chamber concluded, was that under the current system a prisoner does not get a chance to prove that they are reformed.
The Grand Chamber’s seventeen judges ruled by sixteen to one that there had to be a review of the sentence and, at least, the possibility of a release. But they added that this did not mean there was ‘any prospect of imminent release’.
Jeremy Bamber dismissed the decision as ‘hollow’ as he was still serving a sentence for a crime he insisted that he did not commit. The European Court’s judges were sympathetic, suggesting that if a prisoner like Bamber was incarcerated ‘without any prospect of release and without the possibility of having his life sentence reviewed, there is the risk that he can never atone for his offence: whatever the prisoner does in prison, however exceptional his progress towards rehabilitation, his punishment remains fixed and unreviewable.’
‘If anything,’ their judgement concluded, ‘the punishment becomes greater with time: the longer the prisoner lives, the longer his sentence.’
Prime Minister David Cameron immediately announced that he profoundly disagreed with the Court’s ruling, and added that he was a ‘strong supporter of whole life tariffs’.
Neither Vinter nor Moore made any public comment on their victory, although both must have believed that there was now at least a chance that they might be released before the end of their lives. If so, they underestimated the decisiveness and clarity of the Court of Appeal in England and Wales.
As we have seen, the European Court’s decision in July 2013 meant that four significant murder trials over the next seven months placed the judiciary in a quandary. Could a judge in England and Wales sentence a prisoner convicted of murder to life imprisonment with a whole life term? The cases involved Jamie Reynolds, Anwar Rosser, Joanna Dennehy and Michael Adebolajo.
In the first three cases, each of the judges concerned concluded that they were still perfectly entitled to sentence the offender to a whole life term, and duly did so, while in the high-profile case of Adebolajo and Adebowale, the jihadist killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby, Mr Justice Sweeney thought it prudent to wait until the Court of Appeal had reached its conclusion on the European Court’s decision. The judge did not have to wait long.
In October 2013, Mr Justice Sweeney had also declined to impose a whole life term on fifty-five-year-old Ian McLoughlin, who had admitted killing sixty-six-year-old pensioner Graham Buck on the very first day of his day-release from prison after serving twenty-one years for a murder in 1992.
Mr Justice Sweeney told McLoughlin, passing a life sentence with a minimum of forty years, ‘The implementation of a whole life order within the current legislative framework in this country is in breach at the time of passing of sentence of Article Three of the European Convention,’ and he therefore declined to do so.
The then Secretary of State for Justice, and Lord Chancellor, Chris Grayling MP, immediately criticised Mr Justice Sweeney’s decision, saying, ‘Our courts should be able to send the most brutal murderers to jail for the rest of their lives.’ Not long afterwards, the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve MP, launched an appeal against the sentence, arguing that it was ‘unduly lenient’ – even though McLoughlin would have been ninety-nine years of age when his minimum term of forty years had passed.
Once again the confusion over the reality of whole life sentences was at the forefront of the discussion over the issue of whether life should indeed mean life. It was left to the Court of Appeal to try to clarify the position in England and Wales.
On 18 February 2014, the Court’s Criminal Division responded to the argument over McLoughlin and the European Court’s decision with a specially constituted Court to hear appeals on three whole life terms and the appeal from the Attorney General that McLoughlin should have been given a whole life term. The five members of the special Court were led by the Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas, with Sir Brian Leveson, Lady Justice Hallett, Lord Justice Treacy and Mr Justice Burnett. Their decision was robust, and made it abundantly clear that judges in England and Wales could indeed continue to impose whole life orders under the terms of the Criminal Justice Act of 2003.
The Court ended up hearing appeals on only two of the four cases. The principal one was, of course, McLoughlin’s, whom the Attorney General had suggested should receive a harsher sentence for the murder of Graham Buck, while the other involved Lee Newell, who was already serving a whole life term for the murder of his fellow prison inmate Subhan Anwar, and was appealing against the decision to jail him for the rest of his life.
What is not in doubt was that the facts of the McLoughlin case were shocking in the extreme. An incredibly bright child, he had nevertheless been a criminal since the age of twelve, and had been sentenced to imprisonment fourteen times before his twenty-fifth birthday, even though it was estimated by one psychologist that he possessed an IQ of 140. Then, in September 1984, at the age of twenty-six, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison.
A man with a profound hatred of homosexuals, possibly driven by his loathing for his own bisexuality, he lost his temper with a gay man named Len Dalgatty, picked up a hammer and hit him over the head several times. McLoughlin then tied a towel round his head to dull the sound of yet more hammer blows. When he was certain that Dalgatty was dead, McLoughlin hid his body in a cupboard.
Shortly after he was released from prison after that first murder, he killed again – and once again, his motive concerned his victim’s sexuality. He became convinced that his victim this time, Peter Hall, had a sexual interest in young boys, which infuriated him. McLoughlin marched the man into the bedroom of his house and stabbed Hall repeatedly until he was dead. In July 1992 he was convicted of that second murder and sentenced to life imprisonment – this time with a minimum term of fourteen years.
While serving his sentence in Littlehay Prison in Cambridgeshire, McLoughlin befriended a fellow prisoner, old Etonian Francis Corey-Wright. A wealthy man, but a convicted paedophile serving a thirty-month sentence for indecently assaulting a ten-year-old boy, Corey-Wright was released in February 2013, at the age of eighty-seven.
Five months later, on Saturday 13 July 2013, on the very first day of his unsupervised release from prison as a prelude to his eventual release, McLoughlin hitched a lift from Spring Hill Prison, near Aylesbury, straight to Corey-Wright’s home in the picturesque village of Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire. As it turned out, McLoughlin was most certainly not suitable for unsupervised release.
When McLoughlin arrived at his home in the village, Corey-Wright invited him into the house and gave him a drink, but things quickly turned ugly. McLoughlin demanded to know where he kept his ‘gold and silver’, but when the elderly man told him, ‘In the bank,’ McLoughlin picked up a kitchen knife and forced him upstairs before tying him up and stealing those valuables he could find, while also taking his bank cards and demanding their pin numbers. Corey-Wright broke free and shouted for help from the upstairs window.
Graham Buck, a neighbour of Corey-Wright, heard the cries and came across the road to help, which only served to infuriate McLoughlin still further. He marched out of Corey-Wright’s front door and grabbed Graham Buck as he walked towards Corey-Wright’s house. No sooner had he done so than he slashed Buck’s throat with a knife. His victim managed to stagger back into his front garden but died before the paramedics arrived. Meanwhile, McLoughlin took off with a pillowcase filled with Corey-Wright’s valuables.
Buck paid with his life for acting the Good Samaritan. As his wife Karen, a nurse aged fifty-five, said afterwards, ‘To kill him was the most senseless, vicious act of violence and cowardice possible. His family and friends will never be able to make sense of what happened.’
McLoughlin showed little remorse, telling the police, ‘I’m not sorry for what I did to the “nonce”, but I’m sorry for what I did to the pensioner.’ In his perverted view Buck had clearly been a homosexual.
McLoughlin’s sister, Karen Baker, called him an ‘evil psycho’ who should hang. She told reporters outside the Old Bailey when he was convicted and sentenced to a whole life term in October 2013 that she had been terrified of her brother throughout her adult life.
‘He was a ticking time bomb,’ she said. ‘It was when he was thirteen he started to change and began getting into trouble at school. He started burgling people’s homes and stealing cars.’ Then he turned to violence.
‘He used to beat me,’ McLoughlin’s sister added, ‘and put rubber balls in the fire to heat up and throw them at me. He is a horrible man and I was terrified until he got caught … He’s had his second chance and I hope he rots in prison. He should have been hanged for what he has done in the past. A life for a life, I say.’
The sister of McLoughlin’s second victim Peter Hall branded his release from Springhill in 2013 as part of his ‘rehabilitation’ as a ‘joke’. ‘This monster has struck again and been allowed to strike again,’ the seventy-one-year-old said, ‘because he has been freed to walk the streets just as he was with my poor brother.’
Unable to come to terms with her brother’s killing, even after twenty years, she described him as ‘evil’ and went on, ‘McLoughlin has never shown a scrap of remorse for what he did to Peter. I would be happy if they gave him a lethal injection.’
The second case the specially constituted Court of Appeal considered in their judgement on 18 February 2014 was every bit as shocking as McLoughlin’s. On 19 September 2013 Mr Justice Jeremy Baker, sitting at the Crown Court in Leamington Spa, had sentenced Lee Newell, then aged forty-four and a prisoner in Long Lartin Prison in Worcestershire, to a whole life term for the killing of convicted child killer Subhan Anwar while they were both prisoners in the jail.
At the time Newell was already serving a life sentence for the murder of his fifty-six-year-old neighbour Mary Neal in Gateley Gardens, Norwich. He had tricked his way into her home, demanded money and then strangled her, hiding her body in a cupboard and getting away with just £60. That was in 1988, when he was nineteen. He had been sentenced to life with a minimum term of fifteen years, but had spent the following twenty-five years in jail because of his violent behaviour. Newell was still there when he took another life on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2013. Newell’s accomplice was fellow inmate Gary Smith, at forty-eight just four years Newell’s senior, who was also serving a life sentence for murder with a minimum of eighteen years for killing twenty-two-year-old Ali Hassan and dumping his naked body in a Leicestershire quarry in 1998. Smith believed that Hassan had been about to tell the police about a jewellery shop robbery he was planning.
Just before 6.00 on that Thursday evening in February 2013, Newell and Smith went to visit Subhan Anwar in his cell at Long Lartin Prison. Anwar considered the two men friends and was certainly not frightened of them. He should have been, for quite without warning, that day his two ‘friends’ took the twenty-four-year-old man from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire hostage. They were armed with a sharpened toothbrush and a sharpened pen.
Anwar had been in the prison for four years and had built up friendships with prisoners and officers. A member of his family later described him as ‘a very young knowledgeable man. He had proven to be a model prisoner, was a wing representative, helped prisoners to be heard, was well behaved and never caused any trouble.’ He was serving a life sentence with a minimum of twenty-three years for killing his partner’s two-year-old baby – although he had repeatedly insisted that he was innocent.
Newell and Smith, who had been involved in taking hostages in the prison twice before in the previous six years, engaged the ‘security lock’ on Anwar’s cell – effectively barricading themselves in. To lull him into a false sense of security, they told him they were keeping him hostage to bargain with the prison authorities, but they nevertheless tied the young man up with Sellotape.
Once they had done so, Newell used Anwar’s tracksuit bottoms as a ligature around his neck and strangled him to death. It took him more than half a minute to do it. Newell then used the cell intercom to inform the authorities that Anwar was dead. Meanwhile Smith made Newell a cup of hot chocolate from Anwar’s supply and sweetened it with icing sugar.
When prison officers asked why they had done it, one of the pair shouted through the cell door, ‘I am bored and it was something to do.’
As the siege went on, the officers heard the pair talking behind the cell door. One was joking to the other, ‘It just snapped. I wonder where he is. I bet Allah has got him.’
There was speculation in the prison that the fact Anwar had been a child killer had made him a target for Newell and Smith. What is not in doubt is that the pair showed no emotion throughout the siege, which lasted until shortly after 8.20 that evening, and walked calmly out of Anwar’s cell after the killing. They were each wearing a trophy from the dead man – Newell his watch and Smith his earring.
‘There was no tension between them,’ one prison officer said afterwards. ‘They were horrendously calm.’ Newell just laughed about the murder and refused to answer any questions. The fact that the killing might mean that he could spend the rest of his life in prison proved no deterrent whatever.
After a two-week trial in September 2013 both Newell and Smith were convicted of the murder of Subhan Anwar. But before the judge could begin his sentencing remarks both men demanded to be returned to their cells because they objected to Anwar’s family members being allowed into the well of the courtroom to hear Mr Justice Jeremy Baker pass sentence. They did so, but their attitude did not deter the judge.
‘One of the most chilling aspects of this case,’ he told the Court out of the men’s earshot, ‘was the almost complete lack of emotion shown by either of you after the killing … you have both murdered others before, on this occasion you did so in a cold-blooded manner, having deliberately lulled your victim into a false sense of security … You, Newell, later laughing about what you had both done.’
Calling these ‘exceptional circumstances’, Mr Justice Jeremy Baker then sentenced both men to life imprisonment with a whole life term.
Of the two men, only Newell launched an appeal against his sentence, and it was this appeal, together with the Attorney General’s appeal against Ian McLoughlin’s ‘unduly lenient’ sentence of a minimum of forty years that was the basis of the landmark ruling by the Lord Chief Justice and his specially constituted Court of Appeal on 18 February 2014.
In the case of McLoughlin, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, specifically stated in the Court’s judgement that Mr Justice Sweeney had been wrong in his view that he could not impose a whole life sentence on the killer. ‘It is clear that the judge did not think he had the power to make a whole life order,’ the Lord Chief Justice pointed out. ‘The judge proceeded on the basis of a misunderstanding of the law. It is our duty to exercise our judgement free from that misunderstanding.’
‘In our judgement,’ he went on, ‘this was a case where the seriousness was exceptionally high and just punishment required a whole life order. A fixed term of forty years was for that reason unduly lenient. We therefore quash the minimum term of forty years and make a whole life order.’
In the case of Newell the Lord Chief Justice concluded on behalf of the whole Court that, ‘The murder was premeditated and involved the use of an improvised weapon. It occurred in prison whilst Newell was serving a life sentence. The deceased took a significant time to die. There was no mitigation. This was a murder where the seriousness of the offence was exceptionally high. The judge was right in making a whole life order.’
The Court concluded firmly: ‘These two cases [of McLoughlin and Newell] are exceptional and rare cases of second murders committed by persons serving the custodial part of a life sentence. The making of a whole life order requires detailed consideration of the individual circumstances of each case. It is likely to be rare that the circumstances will be such that a whole life order is required. Our decision on each case turns on its specific facts and cannot be seen as a guide to any similar case.’
The Court was of the opinion, however, that there remained the ‘possibility of release’ – even for a prisoner sentenced to spend the rest of his or her life in prison. The Court cited what is known as ‘The Lifer Manual’, issued by the Prison Service in 2010. It suggested that the criteria that allowed for the release of a whole life prisoner included: ‘terminal illness, where death is likely to occur very shortly (say within three months); where the prisoner is incapacitated, being paralysed or suffering from a severe stroke; the risk of re-offending is minimal (particularly in sexual or violent cases); further imprisonment would reduce the prisoner’s life expectancy; there were adequate arrangements available for care outside the prison, and early release would bring “some significant benefit” to the prisoner and his or her family.’
But the Court of Appeal also explained that those criteria ‘did not represent the whole of the circumstances in which the power of release might be exercised’. In particular, the Court pointed out that the Secretary of State for Justice had powers to ‘release a life prisoner on licence if he is satisfied that exceptional circumstances exist that justify the prisoner’s release on compassionate grounds’.
Yet they also reiterated the view of successive Lord Chief Justices, in particular Lord Steyn, who argued, ‘There is nothing logically inconsistent with the concept of a tariff by saying that there are cases where the crimes are so wicked that even if the prisoner is detained until he or she dies it will not exhaust the requirements of retribution and deterrence.’
At the same time, they quoted another Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, as saying, ‘If … the position is reached where the continued imprisonment of a prisoner is held to amount to inhuman or degrading treatment, we can see no reason why, having particular regard to the requirement to comply with the Convention [of Human Rights], the Secretary of State should not use his statutory power to release the prisoner. In our judgement the law of England and Wales,’ the Court concluded, ‘therefore does provide an offender “hope” or the “possibility of release” in exceptional circumstances which render the just punishment originally imposed no longer viable.’
In other words there may be light at the end of the tunnel for a whole life prisoner, but it is a very faint one, for no one, not even the Court of Appeal, can precisely define what those ‘exceptional circumstances’ are – as the case of Jeremy Bamber, who was convicted of killing no fewer than five members of his family, including two children, amply proves.