God! And I thought we over here were nuts

[Grojlach]

A year inside then back to Bleak House with a bounty on his head?

Tony Martin faces a peculiar freedom, with his champions clamouring for his story and vigilantes out for revenge.

Steven Morris
Wednesday October 31, 2001
The Guardian

By the time Tony Martin made his first court appearance charged with the murder of the teenage burglar Fred Barras his case had become a cause célèbre.
Neighbours and strangers alike held a noisy demonstration outside King's Lynn magistrates court demanding his release, and some sections of the media were already lionising him as the ordinary man who, plagued by burglars and let down by the police, had struck back but was now being persecuted.
Over the coming months, politicians, commentators and public opinion turned the Norfolk farmer into something approaching a folk hero.
After he was convicted of murdering Barras, 16, and wounding his accomplice, Brendon Fearon, William Hague's Conservatives party promised to change the law. The issue so troubled Tony Blair that he wondered in a memo, which was leaked, whether Labour was losing touch with public opinion.
Police chiefs vowed to do more to combat rural crime and money from members of the public flooded into an appeal fund. The burglars were vilified.
But Tony Martin was always an odd kind of hero. He thought of himself - and few contradicted him - as an "eccentric" who preferred the company of the three rottweiler dogs he kept on his dilapidated farm, Bleak House. Wearing his work clothes and boots, he slept on his bed rather than in it and had a collection of teddy bears whom he thought of as "very nice people".
And his case, rehearsed during a tense and often dramatic trial at Norwich last year, was of course never as simple as his champions would have had it.
From the outset Martin claimed that he opened fire on Barras and Fearon, who between them had a string of convictions, in self defence. He claimed his home in the remote fenland village of Emneth Hungate, near Wisbech, had been targeted by burglars for years and said that he had lost faith in the police.
The crucial issues were Martin's location when he opened fire on the burglars with a Winchester pump-action shotgun - which he claimed he had found - and his mental state at the time.

Burglars
Martin's story is that he was in his bedroom when he was woken by the sound of the raiders breaking in. He said he fired from the rickety stairs into his breakfast room after a torch was shone at him.
The prosecution accused Martin of lying. It said he was waiting for the burglars in the dark on the ground floor of his home and had in effect "executed" Barras.
Forensic tests concluded that at least two of the shots must have been fired by Martin while he was downstairs. But Martin's position when he fired the first shot - the one that killed Barras - is vital.
Martin's defence took the "tactical" decision of going along with the theory that all the shots had been fired while downstairs. Its alternative was to have to explain why Martin had fired once from the stairs then pursued the raiders downstairs. Such a scenario did not fit with the idea of a terrified man only trying to defend himself.
As to his mental state, the prosecution depicted Martin as an angry man. It pointed out he had violent views about burglars and especially about travellers - Barras was from a travellers' community. Martin once talked of "putting Gypsies in one of his fields surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gunning them". His defence maintained that he was terrified.
The jury clearly believed Martin had fired in anger and convicted him. Newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Sun had a field day, especially when spurious claims that the jury had been nobbled emerged.
The chocolate tycoon Peter Cadbury was one of the first to donate money to an appeal fund. "The verdict gives criminals the licence to rape, murder and mug householders in their own homes," he said. In one television poll soon after the verdict, 85% said they believed the jury had got it wrong.
William Hague clearly took note. In April last year he won banner headlines when he promised to overhaul the law on self defence to protect the likes of Martin.
Coupled with controversial views on asylum, Mr Hague's stance on the Martin case is credited with giving the Tories a fillip in the local elections when the party clawed back many of the seats it had lost in the early 90s.
Tony Blair was clearly rattled. The leaked memo to the prime minister's closest advisers cited reaction to the Martin case as evidence that the government was "somehow out of touch with gut British instincts". And with regard to the case, he suggested "asking a senior judge to look at changing the sentencing law, ie to allow lesser sentences than life".
At the time the leaked memo was front page news; no lesser figure than Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice - and, coincidentally, the presiding judge in Martin's appeal - claimed judges were being forced to pass wrong sentences because parliament had taken away their discretion in some cases by making them impose mandatory sentences. It is not an uncommon view. Many judges feel uneasy about the mandatory life sentence.
Meanwhile, the rightwing press had not forgotten Martin, expressing anger when Fearon was released from prison 18 months into three-year sentence for the break-in, and seething when it was revealed that he had been given the right to be consulted over the conditions surrounding Martin's eventual release under the government's victims' charter.
Only last month the writer Frederick Forsyth was questioning in the Daily Mail why an aide of Osama Bin Laden's was receiving British taxpayers' money to fight extradition - suspects often receive legal aid to fight such proceedings - while Martin had not (at that time) had public funds for his appeal. The Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn has even written a novel with elements based on the case.
For Martin, life in prison has been reasonably quiet, though his fame has led some inmates to try to provoke him. His cell in Gartree prison, Leicestershire, is decorated with pictures of the trees that surround Bleak House. He does not mix much with others and continues to sleep fully dressed and on top of his bed.
He is not impressed by the political talk, accusing both Labour and the Tories of delivering "rhetoric" instead of policies. In an interview broadcast on Radio 4 in May, he said: "You can have as many policemen as you like but if you don't give them proper powers it is like sending a stooge down to see you." The shooting itself he says remains "a haze... surreal".
Martin has said that on release he first wants to visit his two dogs (one has died) and then set off on a tour of Britain to thank everyone who has supported him, sleeping in his vehicle if necessary.
Eventually, "depending on the season" and "when the mood is right", he will return to Bleak House and try to take up his old life there. He will still be frightened of burglars - the world even outside Gartree is "like a prison" he says - and so he will keep the metal shutters which have been fitted. He does not plan to farm.
Martin told a psychiatrist he would not own another gun and would not take the law into his own hands again if faced with burglars. Yesterday, however, he seemed to contradict this stance when minutes after the appeal court's decision, he told his solicitor that "99% of people" would have reacted as he did. Martin's long-term future remains unclear. He has been told that psychiatric treatment will do him no good. Police have intelligence that there is a £60,000 bounty on his life and there have been threats to burn his house down.
When he is released, probably this time next year, he will doubtless receive police protection and there will be a hunger for him to tell his story. Perhaps eventually he will be able to resume what for him is ordinary life in the wreckage of Bleak House.

Source: Guardian

(Note: as you can see, a British newspaper like the Guardian actually tries to give information on both sides of a story in their articles; which might be refreshing to some. )

[ 06-21-2003, 06:12 AM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]

[Epona]

Thanks for posting those Groj.

I don't know about anyone else, but I used to go scrumping when I was a kid. I also used to hang out around old farm-houses, especially if they looked abandoned and decrepit. Most rural kids do. Good job I didn't grow up around that area, or I might not have made it to see 17.

[khazadman]

Going to prison for defending yourself? Now that's wierd.

[Mouse]

Nobody gets put in prison for defending themselves as long as the force and methods of self defence used are reasonable.

Here's an example:-

Someone comes up to me in the street and punches me. I take a swing back, connect and he falls over. I walk away, he gets charged with assault or some other public order offence.

As above but when he falls over, I run up to him and stamp repeatedly on his head. He dies, I get charged with either murder or culpable homicide.

The difference is that in the second example, the force I used was far beyond what was reasonable given the circumstances and in a civilised society, I believe it's the judicial system or legislature to decide what constitutes reasonableness in any particular situation, not the individual.

[Melusine]

Exactly Dave, what a great post!
What I've always wanted to ask is this: why are some people so quick to yell "I'll kill the bastard whot walks into my house!!" First of all, I think guns ARE part of the problem. Since less people have guns where I live, most burglars will NOT expect violence if they are caught, and hence will not kill the inhabitants of a house they burgle "to be on the safe side" (mentioning this because it's an argument I often hear). So since burglars usually just steal stuff and flee when caught, there is less chance they'll feel the need to bring a gun to defend themselves. But let's not get into that gun debate again... the point I'm working towards is: if you cannot be sure a thief will kill you and your family, why shoot them dead the first chance you get? To me that IS excessive force. Look, if the guy enters your bedroom, sure I would say there's a reasonable chance he's a threat. But like I said, where I live most of them enter your house planning to STEAL, not to MURDER. Most of the time they flee when they fear the inhabitants heard them.
So why would you shoot to kill? Why not shoot in both kneecaps if you're "only" defending yourself?
I can totally understand that if you have a reasonable fear you or your family is in danger, that you'd want to make sure nothing happens to them. But why always shoot to kill? Why do I never hear someone "I'll shoot him in the legs" or somewhere else that has less chance of being lethal.
Murder IS worse than theft! Of course the thief is totally wrong for entering your house, and the consequences are his own fault. But YOU determine what those precise consequences are, and I for one cannot understand the ease with which people condemn themselves to having killed a person.

[Grojlach]

Originally posted by Mouse: The difference is that in the second example, the force I used was far beyond what was reasonable given the circumstances and in a civilised society, I believe it's the judicial system or legislature to decide what constitutes reasonableness in any particular situation, not the individual.

Exactly. We shouldn't feel as if we automatically have a right and think that it's okay within the law to respond with excessive violence when you're trying to correct someone who in any way violates the law, while a lot less violent reaction would have sufficed just as easily.
To drag an example of this into this debate, I'd like to refer to a post I made earlier this week (yeah yeah, I know, but I spent two hours on that post and no one bothered to respond to it so far - do I sound bitter? ), trying to explain why I think playing a judge with excessive violence of your own to correct someone who violated the law - while a more subtle approach would have solved the problem just the same - is just wrong.

With a few small differences (as the cases are naturally not entirely the same), I think the following excerpt from that post is dead on on some points in this case:

Standing up for one another is definitely a good thing, but it's not a carte blanche to act like a violent criminal yourself in the process - taking advantage of the situation to play your own violent judge, vent all of your bottled-up frustrations and anger on an already captured and neutralized thief - frustrations which may not even have that much to do with the thief himself, but are based on paranoia and earlier experiences - and later refer to it as "self-defense" or "just" is what I refer to as "excessive".

[ 06-21-2003, 11:40 AM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]

[Grojlach]

And well said, Melusine. [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img] I've also been wondering why many people seem to think guns and large blunt items are a "proper" way to defend themselves, while the use of, for example, pepperspray, stun guns, special guns loaded with harmless yet effective kinds of anaesthetics (effective in a way that the thief will simply fall asleep for a few hours), or even "special" light and sound effects to startle the thieves is hardly ever even mentioned.
I mean, if you're already paranoid about possible intruders, why not think about some proper alternative non-lethal, non-messy kind of preperation instead? Like Melusine said, why the fixation on killing rather than neutralizing or scaring away the intruders?
Maybe it's just a mentality thing, but perhaps someone could explain it to me.

[Grendal]

I hope nobody got me wrong with my other post but my key words were "sneakin through my house" I think a large blunt object to the head is perfectly reasonable force to use againt an intruder in MY home. If i see someone breakin into MY car in MY driveway, I think a baseball bat to the knees is reasonable force although a baseball bat to the head would be excessive. If the lads trying to blow ppl away for stealin apples, well ya, thats a little excessive as well. I am not trying to come to the rescue of Mr Martin for his "grave injustice" Just puttin in my 2cents about what an intruder will come upon at my place. As for home intruders not resorting to violence if they dont think theres a gun in the house GIVE YOUR FRICKIN HEAD A SHAKE! Here in Vancouver we had a rash of home invasions recently against the elderly. And to you young ones Im talkin about folks who were in their 70s and early 80s not in their late 40s or 50s! You think the invaders went easy on them? NO the old folks were dragged into THERE OWN living rooms where they were tied and beaten senseless, and if memory serves correct at least one of the beatings ended in the death of an elderly person. Ppl who break into homes deserve whatever they get, and I for one am not going to ask questions first before decideing on what is reasonable self defense in my home.

[Grendal]

[img]smile.gif[/img]

[Melusine]

Originally posted by Grendal: As for home intruders not resorting to violence if they dont think theres a gun in the house GIVE YOUR FRICKIN HEAD A SHAKE!

Err.. shake your own "frickin" head and read my post again. [img]smile.gif[/img] I was just giving information about the situation in my country. If you're from Canada, you have a different gun law than my country has, and therefore your example is useless to me since I wasn't talking about that.
It *is* true that since people normally don't own guns here, thieves usually do not consider the possibility and hence are not as prone to "disabling" the inhabitants of the house they burgle as a preventative measure. It's only logical, don't you think - most people don't own guns, therefore thieves know there's little chance of being shot when they break into someone's house, therefore they don't whack those house owners' brains out just to be on the safe side... and therefore house owners don't think they need guns.
Not saying it doesn't happen, just saying it happens a hell of a lot less often. Theft is still wrong, but at least there's a smaller chance people get killed when it happens here.

[ 06-21-2003, 01:18 PM: Message edited by: Melusine ]