Last week it was announced that Clive Sharp, who murdered Irish vet Catherine Gowing, has already been jailed twice for rape and sexual assaults. His string of previous sexual offences, encapsulating a dark and twisted life, first began when he was only sixteen. Sharp allegedly held sexual fantasies regarding gagging, raping and murdering women, which he eventually did to the tragic Catherine Gowing, his girlfriend’s flatmate.
Today, Mr Justice Griffith Williams jailed him for life and decreed that he serve a minimum of 37 years in prison as punishment for his horrific crimes. The judge described this murder as ‘a horrific, cold hearted murder, carried out to gratify your perverted sexual desires’.
It emerged that Sharp, having raped and then murdered Gowing, cut up her body before disposing it in several places along the River Dee. Several hours before this despicable crime, he had actually tied another woman to a bed and left her there after she refused to gratify his desires. In 1994 Sharp choked and assaulted another woman, before being jailed for eight years for false imprisonment and wounding two years later.
As someone who studied Law for two years, I’ve had my fair share of disgusting cases involving sexual violence, murder, and dismemberment – and yet cases like these continue to shock not only me, but the general public as well.
What does this say about our legal system, when someone like Sharp, who was clearly not only a sexual predator but someone unspeakably dangerous to women (and possibly even men, one might add, if they got on his bad side), is jailed only for a short time before being released again to further threaten helpless citizens? Someone whose first offence occurred at the age that most teenagers are studying for their GCSEs, someone who has had a history of violence towards women practically his whole life?
I’m not saying that capital punishment is correct; four or five hundred years ago, Sharp would probably almost certainly have been hanged, drawn and quartered, or killed in some other way, and many people might argue that this would only serve him right. But in our democratic society, where we look askance at the death penalty, the best our courts can do is hand out a mandatory life sentence for crimes as sickening as these and, in most cases, let the offender out early, to further threaten innocents.
Catherine Gowing will never be brought back – Sharp saw to that. And yet, I honestly feel that whenever I read the paper, or go onto the Telegraph or BBC or whatever website, all I see is harrowing pictures of smiling women – occasionally men – who have been raped, tortured and/or murdered in the most disgusting and unimaginable ways possible. I sound very naive in asking just why do things like this happen and why can’t people respect one another in a peaceful world, but it does beg the question – why do people commit atrocities like this? Does our weak legal system encourage such abominations, or is there something clearly wrong with our society, where predators like this dwell amongst others?
Sexual violence and murder, of course, is nothing new – in my research of Queen Katherine Howard, the supposedly notorious fifth queen consort of Henry VIII who many believe was a bit too free with her favours before losing her head aged eighteen, I’ve uncovered some evidence which actually suggests that this supposed ‘tart’ suffered what we would classify as sexual violence stimulated by aggressive male behaviour from aged at least thirteen or fourteen. It’s not something related solely to females, I’m not suggesting that. But does the British legal system mean that murderers and rapists commit their crimes without fear of the legal consequences? With defences such as loss of control (which includes the so-called ‘anger trigger’), diminished responsibility and even intoxication, many murderers can use these to play down their offences, even though they’ve raped and/or killed someone who is never coming back.
I’m certainly not the first to suggest the legal system may need reforming. And there is clearly an issue with values held in society – but perhaps this is an unfair comment to make when the vast majority of us are appalled by such offences. But surely something must happen in order to prevent innocent people like Catherine Gowing losing their lives so unfairly and brutally.
Conor Byrne
exeposedev 