Letter of the law over when life can mean life

Your report (Yorkshire Post, July 10) of the decision by the European Court of Human Rights begins, “European judges have ruled that life can never mean life”. The ruling quite plainly does not have that effect. The judges found no fault with “whole life” sentences per se.

What the ruling does say is that a prisoner serving a “whole life” term should be told that his continued imprisonment will be reviewed after a fixed time. This is the state of the law in many countries, including Germany, Belgium, France, Italy and Switzerland.

The European judges further acknowledged that the outcome of that review may perfectly properly be that the prisoner should not be released on any one or more of a number of legitimate penological grounds.

The European Court gave an example of such a legitimate ground, namely that the prisoner remained a danger to society.

One small statutory change, to allow for such a review, will solve the problem. The irony here is that the law prior to 2003 did permit a review, usually held after the prisoner had served 25 years.

An Act of Parliament passed in 2003 removed it completely. If, instead, that Act had simply moved the responsibility to a court or the Parole Board, these recent cases would have failed. The European Court can be blamed for many things, but let us not lay at its door decisions it has not made.

From: Alan Carcas, Cornmill Lane, Liversedge.

I CAN’T believe that the original signatories in 1953 to the European Court of Human Rights convention would have expected it to be used to outlaw the death penalty for murderers, or to cause judges to be so callous in their attitude towards the victims of such crimes.

They must be spinning in their graves. Including Churchill, who must surely have believed in the death penalty.

Oh, for some politicians with the courage to restore the death penalty, or even some judges who have a sense of humanity for their victims, before they have it for murderers.