Legal experts have expressed dismay at the wave of criticism engulfing the parole board’s decision to release Harry Roberts, who has served 48 years in prison for shooting dead two police officers.
With Roberts’s release imminent, politicians on all sides have waded in to the row, calling for him to remain in jail.
The increasingly heated debate has refocused attention on home secretary Theresa May’s pledge to the Police Federation last year that the government intended to change the law so that “life should mean life for anyone who murders a police officer”.
Experts said that the row was in danger of undermining respect for the rule of law. “It is a strength of our justice system that prisoners’ release is decided by an independent body according to the highest standards of procedural fairness,” said Andrea Coomber, director of law reform and human rights organisation Justice. “When the parole board directs the release of a prisoner, the rule of law demands that that decision be respected. The fact that the board, like our courts, takes decisions from time to time that are unpopular doesn’t mean that it is wrong.”
But many people are livid that the parole board has decided Roberts can be released, despite having served almost half a century in prison for shooting dead two policemen near Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966. Sentenced to a minimum of 30 years, the judge at Roberts trial said he had committed the “most heinous crime for a generation or more”.
London mayor Boris Johnson said Roberts’s release, which is likely to be later this week, will “sicken Londoners”, while Labour MP for Dudley North Ian Austin called Roberts “evil” and told the House of Commons that Roberts should be “behind bars where he belongs”. The chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, Steve White, said that he was “appalled to learn that police killer Harry Roberts is being released from prison”, while May stated her belief that “anyone who murders a police officer belongs behind bars – and behind bars for life. That is why I have made sure the government will change the law so life will mean life for anyone who murders a police officer.”
Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said mandatory sentences to lock up people for the rest of their lives, even after they presented, no further risk to society would distort the principles of justice and be regressive. “The prison service has spent the last 20 years struggling to become a service that’s decent, humane and tries to rehabilitate,” Lyon said. “Who do you encourage to do this important public service if its just a holding operation? What kind of people want to work in that sort of system?”
Roberts is expected to move into a probation hostel when he is released. He is then expected to be moved into sheltered accommodation. Criminal justice experts have suggested that he may use an assumed name to hide his identity.
