The footage of Henry Long, Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole laughing during their trial for the killing of PC Andrew Harper has lodged itself in the public mind, and my mind, for good reason.
Men who dragged an officer to his death behind a car, then sniggered about it in the dock, do not deserve the softened verdict Labour are handing them.
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Henry Long, who drove the car that dragged PC Harper, is not eligible for the release scheme because he received a more severe type of extended sentence.
Lissie Harper and Andrew’s family have campaigned day and night to get justice for Andrew Harper.
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They have more than earned their right to justice, and yet, Andrew Harper’s killers are still being released early.
Nothing in Andy Burnham’s climbdown on early release has changed that.
The exemption the Prime Minister has carved out covers some serious offenders and not others, as though a killing carried out in the way Andrew Harper’s was could somehow fall on the wrong side of that line.
It cannot, which is precisely the problem. Two of the three men convicted of killing PC Harper remain eligible for early release.
There is a bitter irony buried in all of this. Harper’s Law exists because of what happened to Andrew Harper.
It was built to guarantee a mandatory life sentence for anyone who kills an emergency worker in the course of their duty.
Yet it does not apply to the three men who killed him.
Long, Bowers and Cole were sentenced in 2020, two years before the law bearing his name reached the statute book, and the law was never made retrospective.
We have a piece of legislation named after Andrew Harper that would have kept his own killers in prison for life, had it existed sooner.
It did not, and Cole and Bowers remain on sentences that leave them eligible for early release.
One of Andy Burnham’s first acts as Prime Minister will be to open the prison gates to thousands of offenders and killers.
Victims who were told their abusers might walk free early cannot be told the trauma has passed.
Lissie Harper and Andrew’s family cannot be told their fight is over while two of the men convicted of killing her husband remain eligible for this scheme, leaving them to suffer their own life sentence.
PC Andrew Harper did not have to be on that road the night he died. His shift had ended. He went anyway, because of his strong sense of public duty.
The country’s instinct is to stand with people like that, and against those who killed him – it does not need lecturing on the difference between right and wrong.
It simply needs a Government willing to act on it.
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