UK paper asks: What’s wrong with shooting burglars?
What’s wrong with shooting burglars? For 1,000 years, the
Common Law of England let homeowners use force if they
felt threatened by intruders until liberal judges
hijacked the law and set a twisted agenda of putting
criminals’ ‘rights’ before those of ordinary people
The Mail on Sunday (England)
Page: 52
August 3, 2003

Byline: Peter Hitchens
You and your wife are alone in your house late at night. You
are woken by footsteps and banging downstairs. What do you do?
If you have any sense at all, you will do nothing and hope the
intruder goes away quickly. If he bursts into your bedroom, you
would be wise to submit to him and not to look at him too
carefully in case he gets the idea that you might be able to
identify him later.
You know that if you ring the police they will probably take
too long and may not come at all. And if you resist the thief,
attack or injure him, you are likely to find yourself in a
shared cell watching trash TV and eating prison slop with
plastic cutlery as you do your time.
You are even more likely to be sued shamelessly and
successfully in the courts by the man who has robbed you. If you
kill him, which at least means he cannot sue you or intimidate
you or come back for more, then the law will probably treat you
as a murderer, making no legal distinction between you and
Harold Shipman.
In the unlikely event that the thief is caught and
prosecuted, he and his friends will be free to terrorise you
into withdrawing your evidence, and the jury that hears the case
into acquitting him, since a feeble police force rarely, if
ever, acts to stop such things and often does not bother to
patrol court buildings any more.
If by any chance he is convicted, he will swiftly be
released under one of ‘tough’ David Blunkett’s many schemes for
letting prisoners out as rapidly as possible. He might even come
back to steal whatever he left behind the first time.
Countless citizens, especially women living alone, now sleep
with some sort of weapon or blunt instrument by their beds in
case they are disturbed by thieves in the night.
Others, especially those living in the countryside where the
police have vanished, look thoughtfully at their legal firearms
and wonder if they dare use them, even as a deterrent.
This is the disgusting, pitiful state of the law of England
in 2003. Unless it is changed, it is only a matter of time
before the prosperous suburbs of Britain are laid waste and
plundered by armies of thieves, rightly confident that nobody
can or will stop them and that they will not be punished. It is
only the surviving illusion, on both sides, that we still live
in a policed and law-governed country that stops this happening
today.
Tony Martin, a strange and muttering loner, has won the
sympathy of millions not because he is a good example or because
he behaved well when he shot a burglar dead. His popularity is
the result of frustration and rage among the law-abiding who
feel that they could easily have acted as Martin did. They
probably won’t because they are more worldly and have more
sense.
On the one occasion I spoke to Martin, shortly before his
trial, I told him he was very likely to be convicted. He was
astonished. He still thought he lived in an older England of
stout-hearted juries and robust judges where his action would be
excused if not applauded.
That country died some time in the past ten years. As
recently as 1993, Judge Daniel Rodwell awarded Malcolm Hammond
L300 for shooting two armed robbers who raided his home, saying:
‘He showed great gallantry in tackling these dangerous men and
protecting his pregnant wife from further harm.’ But the shadows
of political correctness were already deepening, though few
realised it at the time.
Six months later Mr Hammond was brought back to the same
court and fined more than L2,000 because the pistol he had used
was illegally held.
Mr Hammond always denied this and said he had wrestled the
gun from one of his assailants.
Once upon a time, nobody would have cared all that much, but
in John Major’s semi-Socialist Britain it was slowly becoming
clear that the law was now neutral between ‘offender’ and
‘victim’.
By the time Martin came to court it was even worse. The
system wanted to make it clear that it disapproved much more of
Martin for killing a burglar than it did of the fact that he was
burgled in the first place. Huge pressure was placed on Martin
to recant and show remorse for his action. He was kept in prison
far longer because he wouldn’t.
No parallel effort was made to make burglar Brendan Fearon
do the same, though he was almost as responsible for the death
of Fred Barras as was Martin. In fact, the prison system
couldn’t spit him out fast enough and despite Mr Blunkett’s
bluster and demands for explanations the Home Secretary knew
perfectly well that this was the case.
Until recently, Englishmen were allowed to defend their
homes and to keep weapons, just as many Americans still do.
Partly because the US is still much more rural than we are,
and proper policing is impossible, the old English idea that a
burglar loses his rights when he breaks into someone’s home is
still very much in force. That is why ‘hot’ burglary, where the
homeowner is in his house, is so much rarer there than here.
In Britain now we have the worst of both worlds police who
can’t or won’t protect us, and no right to protect ourselves.
How did this happen?
Some think it was the abolition of the old Common Law rules
by the Criminal Law Act in 1967. But actually this wasn’t so. In
the hands of old-fashioned judges and juries, the 1967 defence
of ‘reasonable force’ would excuse almost any action.
What changed as in all the other great pillars of British
life were the people and the ideas that drove them.
The police chiefs stopped being old military men and were
replaced by social science graduates.
Guardian-reading Crown Prosecutors supplanted
battle-hardened police prosecution officers.
Respectable, middle-aged property-owning jurors in
three-piece suits disappeared to make way for slumped,
unemployed teenagers in shell suits.
The judges stopped being gnarled, disillusioned veterans of
the criminal courts and made way for Sixties idealists who think
criminals need help.
The law became a favourite profession for people whose views
were so wildly Leftwing that they could never win an election,
but who wanted political power anyway.
It was a clever move. At least until the Blair victory in
1997, elite liberal lawyers and judges, radical Home Office
civil servants progressive’ prison governors and Left-wing
police chiefs were the most powerful radicals in the country.
Piece by piece, they took control of the law so that it
defied common sense and instead served their crackpot,
guilt-driven ideas of social justice.
Martin had to be punished severely because he had tried to
impose the old conservative law, which has now been abolished.
Anyone who was thinking of doing the same thing had to be warned
that on this, at least, the law would come down hard.
There was something very symbolic about the way Martin, once
convicted, was then seen being led away handcuffed to a female
guard, about as politically correct a message as you could send.
Was it perhaps deliberate?
And it was only when he claimed to have been sexually abused
as a child, the standard liberal excuse for all kinds of
misdeeds, that his conviction was reduced from murder to
manslaughter.
Interestingly, police officers who shoot suspects rashly or
by mistake tend to get let off. It wasn’t because he had killed
someone that Martin was being punished, but because he had
challenged the new liberal monopoly of force.
All that would be bad enough.
But what makes it unbearable, and what brought it to boiling
point for Martin, is that the police have vanished at the same
time.
As police have been withdrawn from foot patrol, police
houses and stations in the countryside have been shut down in
great numbers.
The combination of weak law and absent constables has hit
isolated country dwellers first.
They know that if they call for help, none will come in
time, whereas the rest of us just suspect that this is so. Rural
people and those who rob them have realised as the rest of the
country is just beginning to do that we are now halfway back to
the Dark Ages.
The ridiculous temporary police station now sitting next to
Martin’s farm does nothing to overcome this since it will sooner
or later have to be dismantled, and then where will Martin be?
And it is because Martin is a rather batty and
quick-tempered eccentric that he has been the first property
holder to discover the real nature of the new law. A more
normal, reasonable person would have submitted, or moved away,
or simply got rid of any valuable property so he had nothing to
steal.
Many of us already adapt and change our lives in this
defeatist way. Lots of police forces will give you a printed
label to say that there is nothing valuable in your car, for
instance.
But as we make these little surrenders, we know in our
hearts that we are running away from a foe we really ought to
confront, and leaving our children a legacy of lawlessness and
chaos.
It may be wise to give in, but it is also shameful. And that
is why so many of us are pleased when we see someone fighting
back, however foolish it may be for him to do so.