http://www.bhfederation.org.uk/federati ... rsies.html
Quote:
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is to review how it dealt with two high-profile crimes against disabled people, after police and prosecutors were criticised for failing to treat them as disability hate crimes.
Both the cases were investigated by Greater Manchester Police and received widespread publicity.
The CPS decision came after furious disabled activists attacked a judge who failed to jail three teenagers who carried out a sustained and violent attack on a disabled teenager – one of the two cases the CPS will review.
The three teenagers from Greater Manchester were this week sentenced to community service orders and curfews after admitting a series of assaults on the young man with Asperger’s syndrome.
The disabled teenager – who cannot be named for legal reasons – was repeatedly punched, kicked and beaten with a tennis racket. He was thrown down an embankment, pelted with dog mess, had his limbs scratched with sandpaper and was forced to drink vodka and gin until he passed out.
The three teenagers recorded the attack – which lasted three days – on a mobile phone.
Stephen Brookes, one of the coordinators of the Disability Hate Crime Network, said the judge’s decision not to jail the three men was “unbelievable”, and that one police inspector had told him it was the worst miscarriage of justice he had come across in 30 years as a police officer.
But there was also confusion about the failure of the criminal justice system to treat the attack as a disability hate crime.
Despite Greater Manchester Police (GMP) originally recording the incident as a hate crime in which the victim was “targeted because of his disabilities”, there was no attempt by prosecutors in court to treat the offences as a disability hate crime.
If they had done so, they could have asked the judge to impose stricter sentences under section 146 of the Criminal Justice Act.
Hopefully the CPS will see fit to actually use the laws we have in the correct fashion instead of cherry-picking guidelines apparently at random.
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"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart,
that you can't take part" [Mario Savo, 1964]