Deadly errors

Jun 7 2009 by Ken Oxley, Sunday Sun

THE heat in the political kitchen is already pretty unbearable. And tomorrow, for Justice Secretary Jack Straw at least, it’s likely to reach boiling point.

As if he doesn’t have enough on his plate side-stepping questions about his loyalty to the Prime Minister, he will come under intense pressure himself over yet another criminal justice cock-up.

Straw will face questions in the Commons over the repeated failings of the probation service in London following the torture and murder of two French students.

Violent Dano Sonnex, pictured above, ought to have been behind bars when he and his accomplice Nigel Farmer killed Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez.

They were stabbed 244 times after being tied up during the savage attack in their flat last June. Tragically, we now know that the process of rescinding Sonnex’s bail conditions and sending him back to jail had begun.

But, as is so often the case, the wheels of the criminal justice system turned painfully slowly. Paperwork wasn’t completed soon enough by the probation service. And when it was finally done, the police dragged their feet in acting on it.

Sonnex’s licence was formally revoked on June 13, meaning he should have been apprehended and sent to jail immediately. But it took officers two weeks to get around to knocking on his door.

That was June 29, coincidentally the day the students were killed . . . just hours earlier, as it happened.

But even before the process of sending Sonnex back to jail had started, alarm bells about the risk he posed should have been ringing loudly in the ears of probation staff.

This is a man who just three days after his release from prison for robbery and violence offences in February 2008, went on to terrorise a pregnant woman and a man, allegedly tying them up and threatening them. Following that incident, his probation officer gave him a verbal warning! It was around this time that the then head of the London Probation Service, David Scott, resigned after pressure from Jack Straw.

So what can Mr Straw possibly say tomorrow to appease the victims’ distraught families, who plan to sue the Government over the blunders that led to the deaths of their loved ones?

No doubt he will use the S-word, the default position nowadays for any politician wishing to appear empathetic towards those they have let down.

And he’ll almost certainly promise a case review to see “what lessons can be learned” . . . a stock phrase that implies the students deaths won’t have been entirely in vain because measures will be taken to ensure such blunders never happen again, even though we all know they will.

The truth is, such mistakes will continue to occur and innocent people will continue to be killed or maimed by people who should never have been released from jail unless our criminal justice system is overhauled. Never mind “learning lessons” . . . that’s just tinkering around the edges of a system that is already creaking and on the brink of collapse.

Probation staff – like social workers – rarely get a good Press. And certainly Jack Straw should make it his priority to find out how on Earth Sonnex could have been assessed as only “medium risk” given his appalling history of violent offending.

That was clearly a probation failing, but it doesn’t get the Government off the hook.

Indeed, Mr Straw might want to explain to the victims’ relatives how the Government expects probation officers to function efficiently, given their impossibly large workloads.

Sonnex’s supervisor, for example, had 127 cases – three times the average – and had qualified less than a year earlier. Given such a ridiculous workload, is it any wonder mistakes are made?

I’m not making excuses for anyone. It was right that heads rolled for blunders made in this case. But Jack Straw, as Justice Secretary, is every bit as culpable as the man he forced out.

He must now make it his priority to fix our broken criminal justice system or do the honourable thing and stand down.