19

They Deserve Nothing Less – Or Do They?

Rahan Arshad and Mark Martin

Families of murder victims often feel very strongly that the killer of their loved one should spend the rest of his or her life behind bars, so heinous were their crimes, and it is difficult to disagree with them. Two men in particular epitomise the revulsion society feels for murderers whose crimes set them so far apart from the morals of a civilised society that it is difficult to see any other punishment as appropriate – they deserve to go to prison for the rest of their natural lives.

These two men are a private hire/minicab driver called Rahan Arshad and a ‘homeless drifter’ from Nottingham named Mark Martin, both of whom killed more than one person and did so without hesitation, conscience or remorse, in the most dreadful ways imaginable.

Let us begin with Arshad. At some point during the late evening of Friday 28 July 2006, this thirty-six-year-old Pakistani, who worked as a driver for a firm in Didsbury, Manchester, killed his wife Uzma, aged thirty-two, and their three children, Henna, aged six, Abbas, aged eight, and eleven-year-old Adam.

He killed his wife first, beating her to death in the bedroom he shared with her using a £1.99 ‘Funsport’ rounders bat that he had bought for the purpose just the day before. He hit her no fewer than twenty-three times. Then, quite calmly, he ushered their three children downstairs into the family playroom and beat them to death using the same rounders bat. He then covered all four bodies with duvets, left the house, and then the country.

The four victims, who all had very severe head injuries, were not discovered at the family’s home in Cheadle Hulme, Manchester, for almost a month – not, in fact, until Sunday, 20 August 2006. The stench of decaying human flesh had finally alerted the neighbours that something was wrong.

As one of the first police officers on the scene said later, ‘The bodies were so badly decomposed that the floor was soup because the bodies had basically melted. The forensic team who worked on this deserve a medal – they could hardly step anywhere.’ Uzma and her three children could only be formally identified by their dental records, so bad was their condition.

Arshad had planned the attack with some care, telling friends that he was taking the family to Dubai for a holiday – thereby making sure no one would be suspicious when their house appeared deserted. In the meantime, however, he bought himself a single ticket to Thailand.

He actually left the country on Saturday 29 July, the day after the killings, abandoning his wife’s BMW car at London’s Heathrow airport before boarding a flight to Bangkok and travelling on to the holiday destination of Phuket. The last-known sighting of his children was the day before, on the final day of term at their school, Cavendish Road Primary.

Shortly after the discovery of the bodies the police tracked Arshad down in Thailand – with the help of the Thai police – and he agreed to help the British police with their investigation, possibly fearing that conditions in a Thai prison might be distinctly harsher than those in England. On 30 August 2006, he was arrested by officers from Greater Manchester Police in Thailand and flown back to England the following day.

There was no other suspect for the killings, and it rapidly emerged that Arshad had been consumed by jealousy as a result of his wife Uzma’s affair with a neighbour’s husband. It transpired that his and his wife’s marriage had been ‘arranged’. They were first cousins who had never met, and only knew of each other through their families.

It also became clear that after their marriage Arshad had rapidly become infuriated by his wife’s acceptance of western style and dress, including wearing tight jeans and tops. He insisted privately that by doing so she was ‘disrespecting him’, an attitude only made more acute by his subsequent discovery of her affair.

‘It wasn’t right for a mother and someone who came from Pakistan to change the way she dressed all of a sudden. It wasn’t right at all,’ he said later. His wife certainly knew about her husband’s feelings – even confessing to a friend, ‘Count the days before he kills me,’ – although she did nothing practical to protect herself or her children; and she certainly did not leave the family home.

On his return to Manchester from Thailand, Arshad freely confessed to murdering his entire family, telling the police, ‘My beautiful kids. I don’t regret killing that bitch but my kids. Killing my kids.’

Arshad later retracted that confession, however, claiming that it was his wife who killed the children and that he killed her as a result. His claim meant that there had to be a full trial for the four murders. It began on 27 February 2007 at Manchester Crown Court before Mr Justice David Clarke with Arshad pleading guilty to just one charge of manslaughter – that of his wife – and not guilty to the murder charges.

When the prosecution opened their case against him, outlining the details of the injuries to Uzma and her three children, one female member of the jury broke down and wept.

For his part, Arshad gave evidence in his own defence, telling the jury that he adored his wife – ‘she was beautiful,’ – but also depicting her as a bad-tempered, materialistic spendthrift who continually put him down and thought herself to be his superior. He maintained that he struggled to keep afloat financially and was forced to work longer and longer hours to sustain her and the family. He also denied the prosecution’s claims that he abused her – insisting instead that actually she had hit him.

As for killing her, Arshad told the court that he had ‘blanked out’ after confronting his wife about killing their children and his next recollection had been waking up naked in the bath holding the rounders bat. ‘I don’t feel any responsibility,’ he insisted. ‘What happened is nothing to do with me.’

The jury declined to believe him, not least because of the extensive forensic evidence linking him to the crimes, including the fact that when he flew back to Heathrow his Nike trainers still bore some of Uzma’s blood, while some of his daughter Henna’s was on a T-shirt in his suitcase. It took the jury just two hours to find him guilty unanimously of all four counts of murder on 13 March 2007.

Uzma’s brother, Rahat Ali, shouted, ‘Yes!’ as the foreman of the jury announced their decision, and a statement from him and the rest of Uzma’s family was then read out in court. ‘No one can heal the grief we have suffered,’ it began. ‘Uzma was my best friend, our beloved sister and beautiful daughter. My mother can’t understand how he could destroy them … None of us could understand how a father could do such a thing to his own children and his wife.’

Passing sentence, Mr Justice David Clarke told Arshad bluntly, ‘You beat your wife to death in her bedroom and then coldly and deliberately you brought your sleepy children downstairs to meet their deaths. You left the scene and fled the country. It was over three weeks before the bodies were discovered. There is no suggestion of mental illness on your part … Life imprisonment in your case means life. You killed your entire family in circumstances of great brutality.’

For his part Arshad displayed no emotion whatever – beyond shutting his eyes as the judge pronounced sentence. Four members of the jury, by contrast, were in tears.

Outside the court, Uzma’s brother Rahat applauded the judge saying, ‘I am glad this man will never get out of prison. The judge made a brilliant decision. A person like this should never be freed.’

As for the reasons for the murders, Detective Superintendent Martin Bottomley of Greater Manchester Police explained, ‘We will never really get to the bottom of it. There are a number of theories but I don’t think we will know until he tells us.’

That was unlikely to happen, DS Bottomley went on, because Arshad had declined to say a single word to the police after his initial confession. ‘When he came off the plane Arshad came across as someone who wanted to tell us everything,’ the superintendent said. ‘He showed remorse. He was upset. He arrived at Cheadle police station eight hours later and he has not spoken to us since. The first time we saw him open his mouth was at the trial.’

Arshad has not made any comment of any kind on his crime since his conviction, and it seems highly unlikely that he will do so now, for it would appear – according to those close to the case – that he feels ‘totally justified in what he did’, seeing it as an ‘honour killing’ acceptable to his religion and community.

The possibility that Arshad might find himself in prison for the rest of his life appears to have made no difference whatever to his actions, and – perhaps significantly – he has also declined to launch any kind of appeal against his sentence or conviction. There can be little doubt that he deserves to spend at the very least a large proportion of the rest of his life behind prison bars.

The same must surely be true of homeless man Mark Martin, who memorably remarked to a fellow prisoner when he was on remand for the killing of three young women in Nottingham between December 2004 and January 2005, ‘If you’ve killed one, you might as well have killed twenty-one. I’m going to be the city’s first serial killer.’

As a child, round-faced Martin, who was born in Nottingham in 1981, was fascinated by serial killers, including the Moors Murderer Ian Brady and the ‘Black Panther’, Donald Neilson. He even boasted to his best friend at school, Gareth Moyes, how the two of them were going to be the next Kray twins, a pair of brutal gangsters. By then Martin had developed an unhealthy appetite for extreme violence.

‘I saw him once try to smother a baby because it was crying,’ Moyes was to admit later. ‘I just shouted at him, “What are you doing?”’ Before long, the two teenagers were smoking cannabis and taking amphetamines together, which provoked Martin’s aggressive nature still further. Moyes remembered that his friend would hit and swear at young girls they met together.

By the end of October 2004 Martin’s already dysfunctional life as a husband, father and ex-homeless man was beginning to disintegrate. He even telephoned the police on 1 November to tell the operator, ‘I want to hurt somebody. I’m going to end up killing someone … I was locked up last night for trying to strangle my ex-wife.’ It turned out that she had told Martin that she no longer trusted him with their son because of his violent temper.

Martin’s response was to return to living on the streets of Nottingham, where he was known as ‘Reds’ because of a distinctive birthmark on his cheek. But he was also known for bullying and intimidating other homeless people while living rough, often stealing what few possessions they had and boasting that he would be famous. The method he chose to achieve his ambition was murder.

On 29 December 2004, an eighteen-year-old homeless girl called Katie Baxter became Martin’s first victim. She was last seen alive at her sister Charlene’s house that evening, where she had been attending a family party, although she had concealed that fact that she was living rough from her relatives. Two days later, a second young woman, Zoe Pennick, aged twenty-six, also disappeared. She too had been living rough in Nottingham for some time, even though she had a seven-year-old son (who was looked after by her father). Both women had fallen into Martin’s vicious clutches.

Yet it was not until Friday 11 February 2005 that the bodies of Baxter and Pennick were found – inside a derelict warehouse in the city which was a favourite shelter for the homeless community, and where Martin had set himself up in a makeshift tent amongst the rubble.

The local police had heard a series of rumours that there might be ‘bodies’ buried there, and at 11 am on 11 February 2005 a sniffer dog discovered Baxter’s decomposed body under a ‘carefully placed’ mixture of bricks and debris. Five days later, while searching for forensic evidence in an effort to find Baxter’s killer, the police also discovered Pennick’s decomposed body, less than two metres away from Katie’s, and also buried under rubble. Both women had been beaten and strangled.

Police quickly linked the two young women’s deaths to that of a third, Ellen Frith, a twenty-five-year-old mother of two, whose partly burned body had been found in a burning ‘squat’ in the city centre on 24 January 2005. She too had been beaten and strangled.

It did not take long for the police to identify Martin as a prime suspect. As one officer put it later, ‘He was a bully with a short fuse and there was barely a homeless person in Nottingham who did not have a bad experience to tell about him. Nearly everyone we spoke to pointed the finger at him.’

Martin had not been acting alone, however. He had called on the help of two other homeless men during the killings. One was John Ashley, aged thirty-four, known locally as ‘Cockney John’, who played a part in the killing of Baxter and Pennick, while the other was Dean Carr, aged thirty, who was involved in the murder of Frith.

Martin and Ashley were both charged with the murders of Baxter and Pennick and remanded in custody to await their trial, while Carr was charged with the murder of Frith and also remanded.

While he was in prison, Martin began to brag about the killings – telling a cell-mate named Scott Sinclair the precise and grisly details of how exactly he had murdered his victims. After he did so, Sinclair told the prison authorities and the police about Martin’s boasts, and his statement to the police left no doubt about Martin’s capacity for extreme violence towards women, nor about his scant regard for human life. He had killed them, he told Sinclair, for no reason other than that one had ‘scratched his face’ and the other had left a hypodermic needle in his bed.

When they appeared at Nottingham Crown Court on 16 January 2006, however, Martin and his two accomplices denied the murder charges.

Opening the case for the prosecution, barrister Peter Kelson QC told the jury that Martin ‘seemed to be glorying in his notoriety … You will hear evidence that he was relishing the prospect of being known as Nottingham’s first serial killer.

‘He seems to have a fascination with violence towards women,’ the prosecutor went on, ‘with the crimes he committed and with the suffering his victims endured.’

Pressing home the point, Kelson explained that both Martin and Ashley – who had once been Katie Baxter’s boyfriend – had made comments to friends about the killings even before the bodies were found.

One prosecution witness, who had also spent time in jail with Martin while he was on remand, explained from the witness box that he once asked Martin how many women he had killed and was told, ‘Oh five,’ and that Martin boasted that he had fed the other two victims to pigs at a farm in Leicester – a claim that has never been substantiated. He added that Martin was upset that he did not have photographs of the two other bodies to prove he had done it.

Another witness from Martin’s time in prison on remand, who had been terrified by his grim boasts and was persuaded to give evidence against him anonymously, gave the court some of the details of Martin’s account of his killing of Baxter and Pennick.

The witness explained that Martin had reacted badly when Katie scratched him. ‘He said he picked her up and took her to the factory (the disused warehouse) because she fancied him. They were chatting and went into his tent. Then he just snapped and strangled her. He dragged her out of the tent, into the factory and buried her with debris.’

The anonymous witness also explained that Martin had persuaded Pennick to go with him to pick up 2,000 cigarettes that he wanted her to sell for him. Once there, he grabbed her by the throat and strangled her. He then laid her body next to Katie’s and buried her in a similar way. ‘He said he’d sorted her out and “smashed her legs like biscuits” … He said it was hard and she didn’t want to die. He was punching her, kicking her. In the end he stood on her throat.’ The witness also revealed that Martin had vomited on one of the two girls because she had soiled herself while being strangled, but that he had the presence of mind to remove her top in case he had left DNA traces from the vomit.

It was compelling evidence, made all the more so by the testimony of Martin’s former cell-mate Scott Sinclair. But Martin himself declined to give evidence on his own behalf. Nevertheless, it took the jury a week to reach a conclusion. It was not until Thursday 23 February that they returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on all three defendants.

The following day, Mr Justice Butterfield passed sentence. Starting with Martin – who was standing impassively in the dock before him – he said grimly, ‘These murders were committed by you because you positively enjoy killing. You took the totally innocent lives of these women for your own perverted gratification. You have devastated the lived of those who loved them and have not shown a moment of remorse. You have revelled in the macabre details of each senseless, brutal, callous killing. The facts of the offences are so horrific and the seriousness of your offending so exceptionally high, you are to be kept in prison for the rest of your life.’

‘Cockney John’ Ashley was then sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty-five years for his part in the murders of Baxter and Pennick, while Dean Carr was also sentenced to life with a minimum of fourteen years for his role in the killing of Frith.

Outside the court, Baxter’s father Stephen told reporters, ‘Katie was a lovely, happy girl with her whole life ahead of her … She associated with people from the homeless community and although she often stayed in those circles, it was no reason for her to be murdered. She did not deserve to die.’

Pennick’s father Kevin added, ‘The pain of losing my little girl in such a brutal way will always remain with me. Zoe was not homeless. She had a home to go to but chose to associate with other people who led the homeless lifestyle.’

Perhaps predictably, Martin declined to appeal against either his sentence or his conviction, preferring to glory in the notoriety that his killings brought him, and relishing in his new nickname of ‘The Sneighton Strangler’. After all, this was the man who had written to his schoolfriend Gareth Moyes from Wakefield Prison before his trial, saying cheerfully, ‘I can’t believe I’m in jail for murder and three of them as well. Ha ha ha, oh dear, ha. Yeah, it’s a mess boy, hey pal, but I’ll get over it. I was all over the news.’

It is hard to see what other sentence could possibly have been passed on Arshad or Martin. The full weight of the law as it stands today surely demands that they spend the majority of the rest of their lives behind bars – and yet there remains a lingering doubt in my mind about whether the whole life sentences they both received do not, in some way at least, contradict the basic tenets of a civilised society.

Professor Dirk van Zyl Smit of Nottingham University, an expert on penal law and life imprisonment, pointed out in 2014, ‘A commitment that we will never consider the release of some offenders serving life sentences, except perhaps when they are at death’s door, means that we write them off permanently. It means that we deny that with the passage of time they may change for the better; or that we may change our assessment of their crimes.’

‘Worse still,’ Professor Van Zyl Smit concluded, ‘we are denying some fellow humans all hope. In that sense we are putting them in the same position as those awaiting execution on death row.’

It is a powerful argument for, as the case of Jamie Reynolds illustrates for all to see, society, in the shape of its judiciary, can effectively condemn a young man in his early twenties to what could amount to sixty, or even seventy, years in prison. Naturally enough, Reynolds’ young female victim’s family, including her police detective father, are determined that he should pay the maximum possible price for the horrifyingly ugly murder of their daughter Georgia – an entirely reasonable emotion that is shared by almost every other family that loses a loved one to a brutal killing.

Yet there is a sense in which that desire for revenge against a murderer has surely to be tempered by a sense that every prisoner, no matter how heinous the crime, at least deserves the prospect of redemption – however remote. Over a very long period behind prison bars he or she may be capable of rehabilitation and change; and to deny them even the possibility of release is to deny their humanity.

As Professor Van Zyl Smit argued powerfully in The Guardian in 2014, ‘The United Kingdom is one of the staunchest opponents of capital punishment. Yet it appears to have no moral objection to an irreducible life sentence, which in many ways is simply a delayed death penalty. This must change, not because the European Court of Human Rights says that it should, but because failing to act now is morally untenable.’

There can be little argument that a whole life sentence in its present form is indeed a ‘delayed death penalty’, and as such deserves to be questioned far more rigorously than has been the case in this country in the fifty-one years since the effective abolition of the death penalty. Indeed, whole life sentences have become an increasingly familiar part of the sentencing process as those five decades have passed – with ‘sentence creep’ meaning that they are awarded far more regularly than they once were. The political slogan ‘Tough on Crime’ has effectively translated into more and more whole life sentences.

Yet that disregards a vital tenet of human morality – hope.

As Judge Ann Power-Forde, the Republic of Ireland’s representative on the European Court of Human Rights, once memorably put it, ‘Hope is an important and constitutive aspect of the human person. Those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts and who inflict untold suffering upon others, nevertheless retain their fundamental humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change.’

The fifty-two-year-old judge, who has a doctorate in Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy from Oxford, went on to add, ‘Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retain the right to hope that, some day, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed … To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and, to do that, would be degrading.’

Against that moral background it becomes ever more difficult to defend the whole life sentence in England and Wales in its present form, with no possibility – or likelihood – of a review of the sentence. Most European countries allow for a sentence review of some kind after twenty or twenty-five years. The International Criminal Court at The Hague even allows a review after twenty-five years for offenders sentenced to life imprisonment for mass genocide. A review would be no guarantee of release, nor would it prevent an offender judged still a risk to society being forced to remain behind bars.

With suggestions of a fixed term sentence of one hundred years being bandied about by British politicians – which makes the torture of a whole life term even more excruciating – surely it is right that society in this country should reconsider its attitude to the whole life sentence.

To quote Professor Van Zyl Smit again, ‘Instead of suggesting even longer minimum periods … the Government should be honest with the public. It should stress that considering someone for release is not the same as releasing them … Above all, it should make clear that even the worst offender has the right to hope, for with hope, a person can change.’

Professor Van Zyl Smit advocates an ‘impartial Parole Board’ as one means of supervising this change, a suggestion I find difficult to accept given the Board’s manifest failings in letting so many prisoners serving what are technically life sentences out to kill again. Nevertheless, I would agree that a review by an impartial body after twenty-five years of a prisoner serving his or her sentence, with further reviews every five years after that, would at least begin the process of destroying the ‘delayed death penalty’ aspect of whole life sentences.

Even the widely admired former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, has been cautious about using whole life sentence ever more widely, as seems to be becoming the practice.

‘The whole life order, the product of primary legislation,’ Lord Judge has said, ‘is reserved for the few exceptionally serious offences in which, after reflecting on all the features of aggravation and mitigation, the judge is satisfied that the element of just punishment and retribution requires the imposition of a whole life order. If that conclusion is justified, the whole life order is justified, but only then.’

In other words, do not rush to give a whole life term without considering the consequences very carefully indeed. Yet an extraordinarily experienced politician, the former Conservative Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke MP, realises that the demand for the most draconian penalty of all – ‘locking a prisoner up and throwing away the key’ – will always have a visceral appeal, not least to the families of the victims. ‘There will always be a small number of prisoners whose crimes are so appalling that judges rule that they should never become eligible for parole,’ Clarke has said.

Yet the ugly truth is, as Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, has pointed out, ‘We have sentence inflation. It’s because politicians in the last two decades have sunk to a level of punitive competitiveness. But there’s no evidence that it offers better public protection. We have more lifers than all the other countries in the Council of Europe together.’

It has been estimated that there are more than 13,000 prisoners in England and Wales who are subject to life or ‘indeterminate’ sentences – which means that they have to satisfy the Parole Board before they can be released. That is approaching one sixth of the entire prison population, a staggering number of prisoners, and quite unlike any other country in Europe.

I find the suggestion that there should be longer and longer minimum terms for prisoners exceptionally difficult to justify or support, not least because England and Wales are almost alone in Europe when it comes to handing out a whole life sentence. Spain, Portugal and Norway, for example, do not have any kind of life sentence within their penal system. Every other European country, with the exception of Holland, has fixed minimum terms for prisoners sentenced to life.

Even Anders Breivik, the thirty-six-year-old killer of no fewer than sixty-nine young people at a summer camp on the island of Utoya in the summer of 2011 (as well as eight people in a bomb blast in Oslo on the same day) was only sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, in a form of ‘preventive detention’ that requires a minimum of ten years’ incarceration and the possibility of an extension of that imprisonment for as long as he is deemed a danger to society. That is the maximum penalty in Norway; although that is not to say that he will be released after serving the twenty-one years, as he may well still be seen as a risk to the public.

Russia rarely uses an indeterminate whole life sentence for the most heinous crimes, and when it does use one it is restricted to men between the age of eighteen and sixty-five. The maximum sentence most often imposed is twenty-five years, although the period of imprisonment is exceptionally harsh, involving long periods of solitary confinement, sometimes in darkness.

The United States still has the death penalty in some states, as it does a sentence of ‘life without parole’ (although not usually now for offenders under the age of twenty-one at sentencing).

A number of European countries have abolished all forms of indefinite imprisonment, including Serbia and Croatia, while Spain sets the maximum sentence at forty years. Bosnia and Herzegovina sets the maximum sentence at forty-five years, while Portugal sets the maximum sentence at thirty years.

Three African countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Cape Verde, have abolished indefinite life imprisonment; the maximum sentence is thirty years in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and twenty-five years in Cape Verde. In Asia, the former Portuguese colony of Macau has outlawed indeterminate sentences, replacing them with a maximum of thirty years.

In South and Central America, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic have all abolished indefinite life imprisonment, but each has set a maximum sentence. It is seventy-five years in El Salvador, sixty in Colombia, fifty in Costa Rica and Panama, forty in Honduras, thirty-five in Ecuador, thirty in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Uruguay and Venezuela, and twenty-five in Paraguay. Brazil has a maximum sentence of thirty years under statutory law, but capital punishment and life imprisonment during wartime (for military crimes such as treason, desertion and mutiny) are allowed under the Constitution.

It surely must be time for Britain to follow this lead. Scotland has effectively done so since 2001, preferring determinate maximum sentences – with a usual limit of fifty years. Half a century behind bars seems to me the very most that any human being should be condemned to – unless there are profound reasons why he or she presents a continuing risk to the public’s safety. That would not mean an inevitable release after fifty years, but it would make release more likely, and would remove forever the ‘delayed death penalty’ element in a whole life term.

In October 2010, Simon Hattenstone wrote a compelling article in The Guardian detailing some of the letters he had received from whole life prisoners, and one letter in particular underlines the point about hope being an essential part of the human personality. It gives a remarkable insight into what a whole life sentence feels like to the man or woman imprisoned, and how it can be coped with.

‘The question of a whole life term is very difficult to put into words,’ the prisoner wrote. ‘It can be simple or complicated, it all depends on the way each individual approaches the sentence. Obviously a sentence such as a whole life takes away all hope of ever being released. So the first thing you do is accept this fact, which strange to say everyone does. It must be part of the human condition to accept disastrous events.’

The man in question was an armed robber who shot a diamond jeweller in the back and accidentally shot his accomplice at the same time. But he left his accomplice to die rather than call an ambulance or take him to hospital, and then buried him in a railway embankment. He was given a life sentence in 1991 with a recommendation that he should never be released. In 2008 that sentence was squashed and replaced with a minimum term of twenty-five years, with an expected release date in 2017, when the prisoner concerned would be eighty-eight.

‘Put it this way,’ the prisoner wrote, ‘every day all round the world people are told by their doctors, you have cancer (for example) and you have six months to live. Once the initial shock wears off, they accept their fate and carry on doing the best they can. Rehabilitation is largely a waste of time. What’s the point when you’re never going out? Those who do courses do them for purely personal reasons, maybe due to a desire to try and understand how and why they came to be in this position.’

Rehabilitation may be ‘a waste of time’, but redemption is not, and it is the compelling reason why the concept of an endless whole life sentence disturbs me, and should, I believe, disturb British society. It is a ‘delayed death penalty’ and seems to me to have no place in a civilised society. Were it to be replaced by a fixed term of fifty years, which would at least hold out the possibility of release, and acknowledge that an individual – no matter how heinous his or her crime – can change over the period of half a century, would seem to me to a far more accurate reflection of what should be society’s ambition.

Another whole life prisoner underlines the danger of leaving whole life prisoners to become institutionalised over decades behind bars, so disillusioned by the experience that they become nihilistic, devoid of all hope.

‘The past is the past,’ the whole lifer wrote. ‘Nothing good can come out of dwelling too much on things like that. Guilt is a product of obsessive thought, it develops into self-pity, and self-pity serves no purpose in prison other than causing depression, to self-harm and commit suicide. A person can accept their crime and acknowledge the effect it’s had on the victim’s family, and resolve not to do that act again without guilt interfering to complicate matters internally. If I could bring the person back I killed by dying, I wouldn’t hesitate. But I can’t, so I never think about what can’t be changed.’

Even more dramatically, he concluded, ‘What keeps me going is knowing I’ll be dead soon enough anyway of natural causes. The average male only lives until he’s 60-65. The way I see it, I’m closer to death than birth.’

Is the aim of a whole life sentence to force the prisoner to look forward to only one thing – his or her own death? I am not in favour of the death penalty, as I could never accept one innocent man or women being killed in error by a miscarriage of justice, but you could argue that leaving a man or woman to rot behind bars for the whole of the rest of their natural life is almost as fierce and ferocious a punishment.

It does not need to be so. Changes to sentencing to fix a maximum term of fifty years would ease that burden. But there would need to be other changes to go hand in hand with that alteration. The prisons in this country that currently contain some of the worst offenders serving whole life terms – particularly the Victorian-built ‘Monster Mansion’ of Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire – are ill-equipped for the task. There needs to be a rebalancing of the prison estate to take into account the increasing number of violent prisoners serving very long sentences indeed.

I would argue for the construction of one large and well-staffed ‘supermax’ prison, which would house a large proportion of these most vicious offenders and be staffed and financed to provide the maximum security while offering its inmates the latest therapeutic psychological help. It should be run by prison officers who have been specially trained to deal with offenders serving extended sentences and who may well suffer the signs of ageing as a result of their long period of incarceration.

At present we rely on the experience of dedicated prison officers who are expected to cope with an ageing prison population as though it is nothing new. The reality, of course, is that as the population overall is steadily ageing so the prison population itself follows it, with the result that an ever-increasing proportion of prisoners are now susceptible to ‘ageing’ diseases like dementia and heart conditions that were certainly less the case twenty years ago.

If you think back to Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ superb BBC television comedy Porridge, there was hardly a character over fifty, and that includes Ronnie Barker’s Norman Stanley Fletcher. Written almost forty years ago, that programme painted an entirely different picture of the prison system than the one that exists now in the twenty-first century. Now we need a prison system and its officers equipped to deal with an ever-ageing population and inmates who are serving longer and longer sentences, including whole life terms. That requires very different regimes, and even the ever-stern and vigilant Mr MacKay would accept that. The possibility that Fletcher might need incontinence pads after a stroke or special nursing for dementia would transform the regime at Slade Prison beyond all recognition. That may sound far-fetched, but it is the reality that the prison system will increasingly have to deal with over the coming decades.

Contrast the almost homely feel of Fletcher’s cell in Slade with the grim reality of a whole life prisoner’s regime, which – in the worst cases – can mean twenty-three hours in solitary confinement every day of the week, sometimes completely segregated from any other contact, even with other prisoners. If there is an element of education in the system, the prisoner will be in one cell with the teacher in an adjoining cell protected by bars between them. There is no privacy, little human contact, little exercise, and less humanity.

When asked whether there was any possibility of rehabilitation, one whole lifer replied bitterly, ‘Rehabilitation is just a word politicians use and psychologists dream about.’ But he went on to explain with equal force, ‘People rehabilitate themselves when they’re ready to change, when conditions are conducive to it. They can’t be bribed, blackmailed or forced to rehabilitate themselves.’

Surely the prison system should at least be able to offer the worst offenders that opportunity, but that is not the case, and there is little sign of any political will to change the existing flawed system. But I must also acknowledge that amendments to the prison system and sentencing for the worst of the worst offenders will never satisfy the families of the victims of the men and women subjected to whole life terms.

As one whole lifer once put it, ‘If someone killed a member of my family in a similar fashion to what I did, I wouldn’t want them released either. It’s only natural.’

That is the dilemma that lies at the heart of the question of whole life sentences – are they for punishment alone? Do they in any way imply an opportunity for rehabilitation and redemption? It is my view that by sentencing a whole life term, society is implicitly saying that they are for punishment alone – a trade-off against the loss of the death penalty for the worst offenders – and that is something that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable.

If whole life terms are, in fact, a ‘delayed death penalty’, then that should be made clearer, and the circuitous argument that they still represent some remote possibility of release should be ditched once and for all. If we are intent on ‘throwing away the key’, let us not make any bones about it.

The present ambiguous and confused compromise which can see offenders convicted of exactly the same crime, be it the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, or the rapes and murders by the ‘Railway Killers’ John Duffy and David Mulcahy, in which one offender in a partnership of murder is given a whole life term while the other is not, serves only to undermine the sentencing process and confuse society.

If life must mean life then let us say so unequivocally – and reserve that sentence for the very worst offenders – rather than diluting it by implicitly encouraging the judiciary to hand out more and more whole life sentences while the public fail to understand what they mean. One group who do clearly understand, however, are the prisoners themselves. Perhaps it is fitting to leave the last words to one whole lifer who wrote, ‘If I ever walk out them gates, great, so be it, I won’t look back. If I never walk out them gates, that’s just how it is. I expect nothing.’