Those ever shrinking penalties !

A century ago in Australia, a criminal convicted of murder faced the prospect of execution by hanging.  Sometimes this was reduced to life in prison, but that depended on the circumstances of the crime.  Remorse and exceptional circumstances could see such a prisoner eventually released back into society, but the courts upheld the principle of " a life for a life " in sentencing.

The last person in Australia executed for murder was Ronald Ryan, who stood on a trap door with a rope around his neck in Pentridge prison on February 3, 1967.   Since then, the most severe punishment available to judges is a life sentence accompanied by the instruction " never to be released ".    Unfortunately, this has no legal binding and may be overturned on appeal.

Many people will hear with utter amazement the sentence handed down to Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik.  Breivik was sentenced to twenty-one years incarceration, with a minimum term of ten years.  He is thirty three years old, hence at the most be will walk away a free man at the age of fifty-four, and at the least at the age of forty-three.

Surely Breivik's crime is at the extreme end of the punishment scale.   He calmly and methodically planted a bomb in Oslo's government district that killed eight people and did millions of dollars of property damage.   This was a ruse to cause panic while he quietly made his way to Utoya island where young people were attending a youth camp.  Dressed in a police uniform and armed with a high powered rifle he methodically hunted down and caused the death of sixty nine people, delivering a death count of seventy-seven with many more wounded.

Breivik calmly surrendered when the police eventually arrived.   At his trial he has shown absolutely no remorse and claims to be a hero for his efforts to save Norway from having it's Nordic traditions diluted by followers of Islam.   It is clear that this outlook is still his belief, and yet the court has decided that he is not insane and must take full responsibility for his actions.

It seems that in Norway, that twenty-one year sentence is the maximum available to the judges presiding at his trial.   Here in Australia, the death penalty has been taken off the books as a sentencing option, but in reality the maximum term for even a brutal murder is now twenty years.    Of course, no prisoner expects to serve that full period.  With good behaviour and remissions release in half that time would be usual.

The Norwegian justice system has options to withhold the release of a prisoner if that prisoner continues to be a threat to the public and that same situation exists in Australia.   We have several people who have committed mass murder similar to Breivik who may never again go outside prison walls, but these are exceptions.   In the minds of criminals considering murder, the expectation of prison time in Australia is far less than twenty years.

Some would say we live in a more humane age.   Perhaps the erosion of punishment has been a natural process of attrition from the days when starving people were transported for stealing a loaf of bread and minor infringements of order resulted in a lashing with the " cat of nine tails ".

Sadly, for those who have lost a loved one to murder, it seems that the value of a human life has been heavily discounted when it comes to the balances imposed by the law.   Just over three months behind bars for each life Breivik snuffed out seems grossly unfair !