This week the hyper-lenient sentence given to Lewis Gill hit the news. Lewis Gill’s almost entirely unprovoked attack on Andrew Young in Bournemouth last year was the result of the victim merely telling off Gill’s friend. Gill’s friend was riding his bicycle on the pavement and Gill lashed out and punched Young so hard he fell down, hitting his head. Young died the next day in hospital. The sentence given to Gill for this manslaughter? Four years. This is abhorrent. Gill was also serving a suspended sentence for robbery, for which he was given just six months more. I cannot be the only one who feels this is far too lenient, and that the justice system seems inconsistent.

In this particular case, the lack of a sense of justice was compounded by the fact that the attack is clearly recorded on CCTV, showing no provocation, which the judiciary in our country seem to feel needed no more than a couple of years in prison. The likelihood is that once he leaves prison, he will be looking for another victim within half of his sentence, as is standard for ‘good behaviour’ in prison.

Murder and manslaughter are two of the worst crimes a human can commit, and so why is there such inconsistency in our treatment of the crimes? Just last December a man named Eden Lomax was jailed for a minimum 10 years for a similar crime, with a single punch killing 43 year old Simon Mitchell. In this case the aggravating factors for Lomax’s sentence were two other assaults but surely Gill’s suspended sentence for robbery is equally as bad? How can our justice system possibly argue that Lomax deserves a much fairer sentence than Gill, and still sleep at night? The very fact that there are inconsistencies in our system flies in the face of the concept of justice, when our system is not just in how they sentence criminals.