A father’s murder and a soft-touch policy that is a travesty of justice
By Graham Grant
AMID his ‘heartbreak’ over the sexual misconduct claims against his mentor Alex Salmond, Humza Yousaf also reflected last week on the distress of a family torn apart by murder.
The Justice Secretary was responding to two damning official reports on a violent thug who breached an electronic tagging order and stabbed young father Craig McClelland to death.
Praising Mr McClelland’s family, Mr Yousaf said: ‘It is through their tenacity and tireless campaigning on behalf of Craig that we have got to this point.
‘I want to thank them sincerely for their efforts as their campaigning means we will have a stronger, more robust Home Detention Curfew (HDC) regime.’
Changes were unveiled to stop violent offenders being freed early – after serving as little as a quarter of their sentences – to spend the rest of their terms at home.
It also transpired that flouting an HDC isn’t technically an offence and therefore doesn’t lead to extra jail time, a legal deficiency Mr Yousaf now says he is keen to address.
All of which is laudable, except of course that it is wholly disingenuous of Mr Yousaf to assert that some inconvenient anomalies have been uncovered that need to be ironed out.
It seems to have been something of a shock for him that violent offenders were being freed early after shoddy risk assessments.
Yet HDCs, introduced under Labour and the Lib Dems in 2006, have been heavily promoted by the SNP as a way of emptying jails.
Why did it take campaigning by relatives of a murder victim to bring home to ministers that a practice for which they are ultimately responsible was gravely flawed?
In time-honoured fashion for SNP ministers, Mr Yousaf is closing the stable door long after the horse has bolted, as were police when – in the wake of the political row over Mr McClelland’s murder – they hastily began chasing up outstanding HDC warrants.
Back in August, it emerged that officers had taken five years to launch a search for an HDC thug who had vanished from their radar because the warrant was cancelled in error after the breach.
The mistake was found when records were belatedly searched in the midst of the controversy surrounding Mr McClelland’s death, which refocused police attention on old warrants.
Father-of-three Mr McClelland, 31, a university student, was stabbed to death last year by 25-year-old serial knife thug James Wright – who had 16 previous convictions – in an attack provoked by nothing other than the killer’s ‘blood lust’.
Remarkably, Wright remained at large for nearly six months after breaching his HDC – nicknamed ‘armchair custody’ – leaving him free to commit senseless slaughter on the streets of Paisley.
In her victim impact statement, Mr McClelland’s partner Stacey, 27, recounted watching her three-year-old son on his birthday building his daddy out of Lego, and the ‘devastating sound of my baby searching for his daddy in the night – constantly shouting on him’.
For many years, we were assured that HDC was strictly for lower-level offenders, and that prison managers were scrupulous in their administration of the scheme.
But last week we discovered from the HM Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland that it is not ‘easy for them [prison staff] to access information regarding any outstanding charges, or ongoing investigations relating to the HDC application’.
The watchdog concluded that this ‘situation makes it difficult to come to an informed decision about an individual’s overall suitability for HDC’.
More than one in five HDCs are breached – up by nearly a quarter in just 12 months.
Earlier this year, the Mail revealed that 15 offenders had been ‘unlawfully at large’ for five years or more after breaching an HDC – including one who had been on the run for nearly 11 years.
HDC has always been a subversion of the judicial process because it undermines the sentences handed down by sheriffs, putting decisions about granting liberty in the hands of prison officials who – we now know – are ill-equipped to make them.
Rhetoric about tackling the menace of knives begins to look a little hollow in the aftermath of the Wright scandal, while SNP pledges to wage war on organised crime no longer seem credible, after it emerged that some gangsters had been released on HDCs, which they then breached.
Last week HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland said: ‘During our analysis of HDC case files we found that a small number of offenders with known connections to serious organised crime had been released on HDC and had breached their licence conditions and were “unlawfully at large”.’
Of all the many blunders laid bare by the official reports last week, this is perhaps the most disturbing – once gangsters are returned to their home turf, even wearing a tag, they are back in business, and can continue inflicting untold misery on the communities that live in fear of them.
All of this was news to Mr Yousaf, who got the job despite having been fined £300 and given six penalty points for driving without insurance.
His predecessor Michael Matheson made such a hash of the justice portfolio that he was demoted to looking after transport (which is already in such a state of terminal decline that even if Mr Matheson caused further damage, it would be difficult to notice).
The problems with HDC also escaped his scrutiny – but then he was busy presiding over the virtual meltdown of the single police force.
Perhaps the ministers’ apparent ignorance is easier to understand when you look at the wider ethos among justice experts and practitioners.
In August, a leading Scots lawyer claimed it is not in the ‘public interest’ to hunt down criminals who have been on the run for years after breaching HDCs.
Douglas Thomson, president of the Society of Solicitors in the Supreme Courts of Scotland, questioned whether police resources should be used to pursue offenders if they have not gone on to commit other crimes.
In an online exchange, he said: ‘If a person has not been arrested for over five years, one possible explanation is the person has not reoffended and might no longer be a risk to the public.’
He asked if it was in the public interest to send that person back to jail for a few weeks, concluding that the ‘expense of locking him up may well be disproportionate to its perceived benefit’.
Should we show similar mercy to a fugitive who has escaped from an actual jail? Stick around long enough and such a preposterous idea might even become SNP policy…
One also wonders if Mr Thomson would be prepared to explain his cost-benefit theory to Mr McClelland’s grieving partner, or to her son – the little boy reduced to pretending a Lego figure is his dad – when he is old enough to understand the tragedy.
While the rights of victims and their families are routinely mocked, a political establishment that allowed these twisted priorities to take root poses as a champion of reform – attempting to solve problems it ignored for more than a decade.
