Larry Murphy release - Remission system must be reformed
It will also cause a deep sense of fear and foreboding in communities up and down the country.
As is clear from today’s front-page contribution to the national debate, the arguments put forward by Dr Mary Rogan, chairperson of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, and mother-of-one Sue Donnelly — who advocates letting the public know online about the location of released sex offenders — show beyond doubt that there are no easy answers to this vexed question.
Indeed, opinion has long been divided on the issue of how much information should be put in the public domain concerning the whereabouts of registered sex offenders. This takes on heightened relevance when dealing with a callous criminal of the likes of Murphy.
A high-risk category offender, he has shown no sign whatsoever of remorse for repeatedly raping and attempting to murder a woman in February 2000 in the Wicklow mountains. Nor did he co-operate in any way with the gardaí in the course of their inquiry into this dreadful case.
Public safety demands that when a sex offender is released from prison, they must be kept under watch. But the need for stringent surveillance becomes even more pressing when a totally unrepentant offender like Murphy is set free.
In the interest of justice a balance must be struck between the public’s right to know and the danger of whipping up a witch-hunt involving self-appointed vigilantes, with all that implies.
Because he was arrested in 2000, a year before the Sex Offenders Act came into force, Murphy will not be subjected to supervised surveillance. Nor is there any provision to ensure he would be micro-chipped. Another weakness is that he does not have to report to the gardaí and formally register his address with them for a full week after his release.
Despite garda plans to monitor Murphy’s whereabouts and activities, such serious flaws will obviously make it more difficult for the gardaí to keep tabs on him. Visiting him at least once a month is hardly good enough — in the meantime he could literally be anywhere.
Remission is now a much-devalued word. Instead of being an incentive for reform, it has become the norm, whereby many prisoners are automatically granted remission equivalent to a quarter of the sentence imposed, regardless of whether or not they are remorseful or even if they refused to participate in treatment programmes in prison.
Thus, the hardened criminal who refuses to express remorse is afforded the same consideration as those who harbour genuine feelings of regret for their crime. That is wrong.
The bottom line is that Murphy should never have been set free yesterday. It is patently disturbing to learn that as a self-confessed rapist he did not take part in any rehabilitative course while in prison. A cold, calculating and ruthless individual, he was also questioned about other unsolved crimes involving women who disappeared in Leinster but no evidence was found linking him to these cases.
The burning question is this — why was a convicted rapist and would-be-murderer allowed to walk free from prison on the strength of a good-behaviour arrangement that has lost all sense of meaning and credulity? The system is in urgent need of reform.
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