The Brianna Ghey murder was horrific. It showed us that pure evil really does exist in humanity. The killers were caught, charged and now finally have been sentenced.
Brianna Ghey was killed because she was trans, a judge ruled today, as she sentenced the two 16-year-old serial killer obsessives who murdered her to life in prison.
Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe were jailed on Friday for a minimum term of 22 years and 20 years respectively, as Jenkinson admitted for the first time that she did stab the teenager and ‘enjoyed planning the murder’. If they are ever released, the killers will remain on licence for life.
There is no such thing as transphobia. These two were going to kill – it just happened that they got a trans kid rather than another. They had plans to murder more had they managed to evade capture. So fuck all to do with gender identity and more to do with opportunity.
The judge concluded that while Jenkinson was motivated by her ‘deep desire’ to kill, Ratcliffe was ‘motivated in part by hostility towards Brianna because she was transgender’. He used ‘dehumanising’ language, repeatedly referring to her as ‘it’ and speculating about whether she would scream ‘like a man or a girl’.
Mrs Justice Yip said that because each killer was aware of the other’s motivations, she considered them both to be partly driven by transphobia.
Bollocks. I’ve heard similar language used to describe trans people and it hasn’t resulted in murder. A dislike of the idea of someone pretending to be what they are not is not a phobia – this was just the usual teenage hostility to anyone who is different. I recall similar behaviour from my teenage years. I was different because I was reserved – there is no such thing as resverveophobia either. They just latched onto the one aspect on the individual, just as the bullies from my childhood did. They were going to kill regardless.
As an aside, we appear to have another Jon Venables here. While the boy, Radcliffe, might be rehabilitated at some point, I suspect that Jenkinson is beyond any such possibility and should they ever get parole in the future, she will be back inside again fairly quickly. Some people are just evil beyond any hope of redemption.
Anyway, back to the sentencing.
Ahead of the judge Mrs Justice Yip deciding what minimum term the killers should spend behind bars, prosecutor Mrs Heer said she would need to consider whether the murder was motivated by ‘sadism’ and ‘hostility’ at Brianna’s transgender status in determining how many years they must serve.
Right. So if one of the other kids on the kill list had been the victim, the sentence would have been lower, because trans lives are more valuable than other lives. This is odious. This kid was murdered and any other aspect is irrelevant and should bear no part in the sentencing. The crime was murder, the sentence should be the correct one for that, regardless of the victim. What this judge has done, is consider the thoughts of the perpetrators and sentenced accordingly, rather than merely their actions as she should.
Welcome to the twenty-first century and our two tier justice system.
Shirley, it is self evident that the killers had mental problems.
Their defence lawyers must have been cheap.
I don’t give a fuck.
Well you should. It means your life is less worthy.
I dislike the idea of ‘hate’ crimes and ‘hate’ speech. There is either a crime, or there is not.
Identifying ‘hate’ is usually derived from the attitude of those affected, or activists with an opinion to promote. Are these attitudes and opinions questioned in court, or are they just the rumblings of the mob given judicial validation?
It seems to me that ‘hate’ crimes are not that different to the attitude of those hunting witches in previous times.
The same argument extends to the campaign that longer sentences should apply for the killing of police officers etc. Just because they have chosen one particular job doesn’t make their killing any more or less significant than any other, a life’s a life.
Yes, but the police and the like are part of the system and therefore more valuable.
We’re just the lowly peons who slave away to pay the taxes that pay their salaries.
Whilst I agree with the sentiment in this case LR, it is fairly standard form for a judge to consider the thoughts of the perpetrators when sentencing, e.g. a wife who murders her husband after many years of abuse.
I do think there is a distinction between killing someone you know for whatever motive (still murder, but probably less likely to reoffend), and cases such as this where the killing itself is the objective and the victim is random or chosen due to vulnerability or simple opportunity; these people are born evil and should never be released.
That is fair enough as it stands, but the concept of a “hate crime”, which makes the same action and motive into different crimes when committed against different groups of people, is clearly unjust.
But they will be.
When the punishment for a crime boils down to what the PTB “thought was going on in your head” at the time of the deed and not what you actually did then we arrive at our current judicial shambles.
This is a whole can of worms which I’m not sure has any sensible answer over and above what we are *supposed* to have (and I guess by that I mean used to have) in the judicial system, in that each case is assessed on its metits within a broad framework.
Take for example a prosecution for dangerous driving, where the offender is driving like a tit and knocks over a lamppost. A driving ban, probably a fine, back on the road a year later.
The exact same offence (driving like a tit), but replace lamppost with mother pushing buggy and the driver is banged up for a good long while. The difference in sentences is purely emotional as the driver had no intent to hit either.
So on a purely offence based sentencing, either everyone gets banged up for dangerous driving as they might have killed someone, or nobody does as they didn’t mean to.
I get your point, but your analogies don’t really hold up. Dangerous driving and causing death by dangerous driving would be different charges, for example. As for motive, it is the crime that is on trial, not the motive. The best analogy is two identical crimes where we have different punishments based upon the attributes of the victim. In this case, the victim was trans. However, these two planned other victims who were not. Presumably, had it been one of the boys they had in mind, the punishment would have been less severe because those kids were normal. That’s the problem here. All lives are not equal before the law. That’s why hate crime is an abhorrence.
The police were – for once- right in not treating this as a hate crime. But the judge appears to have overridden that.
Clearly, she believes she knows better than the poeople who actually investigated the crime.
And now the mother of the victim weighs in with ‘It was the INTERNET what done it’ and so is feted on nation TV with her plans to wrest the Internet out of the hands of impressionable kiddiewinks everywhere.
Which, if she should succeed, would at least put a stop to boys being groomed into believing they are girls, I suppose….
The parents always feel the need to impose draconian restrictions on the rest of us to make up for their piss poor performance. And the politicians are only too happy to come up with some half arsed, ill thought out legislation to support it.
Like Julia, I hope we get “Brian’s Law” which bans mothers from letting their gay children wear frocks to school.