PC Andrew Harper died in a way no police officer, no citizen, should ever die. He was called out to a burglary in rural Berkshire. When he tried to apprehend the culprits, he was caught in the towing strap of a fleeing car and dragged for around a mile at speeds exceeding 40 miles an hour, sustaining catastrophic multiple injuries and a ‘very severe’ brain injury that doctors could not treat. His widow, Lissie, has spoken with devastating clarity about living with the knowledge that her husband’s last moments were spent being ground into the road surface by thugs who saw him as nothing more than an obstacle to their escape.
In court, those men – Henry Long, Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole – behaved with a swaggering and depraved indifference. They laughed, joked and smirked in the dock, showing no remorse for the officer they had killed or the family they had destroyed. The jury convicted them of manslaughter rather than murder. The trial judge, Mr Justice Edis, applied the law as parliament has written it before sentencing Long to 16 years’ detention and Bowers and Cole to 13 years each.
We are told that lessons have been learned
Now we learn that two of these men – Bowers and Cole – are still eligible to benefit from Labour’s early release scheme. A policy supposedly designed to ease pressure on an overcrowded prison estate has been drawn so broadly that the killers of a serving police officer – men whose offence outraged the country and whose conduct in court epitomised contempt – remain in scope for a shorter time behind bars, potentially serving only half of their 13 year terms. Ministers have paused the scheme’s rollout and promised a review, but Downing Street has confirmed that, as currently constituted, the Sentencing Act still allows Bowers and Cole to be considered for early release. Henry Long, the driver, is excluded from the scheme, but that is cold comfort when his accomplices are not.
