The gangster cousin of singer Leona Lewis is today facing his third major custodial sentence – 14 years after he was convicted of one of London’s most notorious sex attacks.
Can we be spared the unedifying sight of prison reformers bleating that this proves that prison ‘doesn’t work’?
Adrian Henry was aged 14 when he was the leader of the teenage mob Venom, which gang-raped an Austrian tourist in King’s Cross and threw her in a canal.
He was sentenced to 12 years in 1997 and on his release was involved in an armed robbery at Holloway and sent to prison.
One is an accident, twice is coincidence, what about a third?
Only days after being freed in 2009 he broke into a sauna and massage parlour in Kentish Town, threatened the staff with a handgun and knife then stole their belongings and the takings.
And what does he get this time?
He was sentenced to six years by Blackfriars crown court.
/facepalm
From the looks of it he was sentenced to 12 years in 1997 and did all 12. So he was probably even a vicious animal in prison.
One of us is reading that wrong – I think it’s you. The way I read it, the 12 years that passed between 1997 and 2009 included a release, a new crime and a new jail term.
It is rather ambiguous; damned ‘quality journalism’ strikes again!
His total cost to the state must now run to a figure sufficient to put my daughter through the best public school in the land and university whilst still leaving enough for all sundry costs. How many of him can we pay for before we run out of money?
I think we’re well past that point. But think of all the civil servants he’s keeping in a job!
The trouble with 3-strikes laws is that, out of all the criminals that there are, a few are like Henry, and the rest aren’t. So you end up with people who aren’t particularly bad being expensively sent to jail forever, just for the sake of a couple of evil bastards.
Also worth noting that English law already says that if Henry commits another serious sex offence, he *will* go down for life. Meanwhile, six years for robbing a brothel without actually hurting anyone sounds about right. Especially as he’s probably enough of a dickhead that he’ll again serve the full stretch.
Well, maybe. But if they can’t keep their noses clean and go straight, why should society put up with them?
Unless he gets a ‘public protection’ sentence, he’s very, very unlikely to ever do life as we’d all want it to mean….
It’s a wonderful deterrent for those considering criminal behaviour as a lifestyle.
In the US there are people who go to jail for life after stealing a slice of pizza. that isn’t justice.
Justice should consider the crime and the history so that crime X gives a sentence Y.
So Tyrone or whatever does crime X. It is his second offence so he serves X * 2. Fully serves. No release for good behaviour but more time for bad. On his third offence it is sentence * (2 + 2) and so on. Thus the sentence escalates and is linked to the crime. So stealing a slice of pizza is sentence Z, fourth offence = Z* (2+2+2) Represents the crime plus the criminals history.
So, I don’t like three strikes. Not justice.
john b and Lord T have given a couple of good objections to the three strikes idea but there are a couple of others. First is the rather arbitrary nature of it. Why three strikes and not two or four or one or eight? It’s a magic number borrowed from baseball that appeals to headline writers, and that doesn’t seem like a sensible basis for a law. We all accept that some offenders probably don’t deserve a second chance so it seems reasonable that other offences deserve more than three. Seems odd, and certainly not just, to sentence two people for an identical crime, one to life and one to six months, simply because one of them had committed one more offence than the other.
Secondly, and this is the bit that disturbs me most, it creates an incentive for greater violence for those two strikers busy committing their third offence. Since it’s a life sentence if they get caught it may be worthwhile eliminating witnesses even if it’s for something fairly trivial, because a three strikes law suddenly makes no offence trivial when someone’s already been done twice before. If nicking the charity box is going to get you the same sentence as if you’d murdered someone you might think you may as well hang for a sheep as a lamb and murder anyone who sees you nicking the charity box.
Better to have sentences that actually fit the crime, which of course didn’t happen in Adrain Henry’s case. But skewing sentences from too lenient to too harsh is not a solution either. We should look for the Baby Bear prison sentence: porridge that is just right.