Perhaps I should have written about Michael Jackson.
Instead, I paid my dues by being stuck in a car for long spells with French radio playing his music or running news and features about his death in wall-to-wall fashion. And even though that music left me cold (at least since MJ's voice broke), I did allow myself to be dragged, with a daughter and friends, to one of his concerts, years ago, at Wembley.
Bernard Madoff and Florence Cassez? Just two recent manifestations of the particularly immature penchant of certain judicial systems for imposing prison sentences in excess of what anyone can reasonably expect by way of lifespan.
It may be that Madoff deserves to spend the rest of his days in jail. His spectacular frauds had real victims and required exemplary punishment.
But if courts wish defendants never to be released, they need only pass life sentences, stipulating what in the UK is called a "whole life tariff" if necessary. Coming up with figures such as 150 frankly makes them look idiotic.
Florence Cassez is also entitled to relatively little sympathy assuming she is guilty, which she denies, of complicity in kidnappings in Mexico.
I still cannot get it out of my head that it must take supreme effort for a judge to keep a straight face when sentencing a woman in her early 30s to 96 years' imprisonment.
In the Cassez case, the light of forgiveness has shone brightly enough for the term to be reduced to 60 years. Listening to the Mexican ambassador to France justifying the penalty, it was clear that his government had refused to send her home to serve her sentence in a French prison because it knew perfectly well that France, without being any kind of soft touch, would inject sanity into the verdict.
The ambassador also said, if I am right, that Mexican law allowed no hope of parole in her case. Even so, I shudder to think what danger to society she may still represent at 93.
If this world of celebrity dying and serious crime seems an awful long way from Le Lavandou, this morning's Var-Matin made me think again.
Down on the seafront yesterday afternoon (Tuesday), Vladimir Zakharchenko, a Ukrainian businessman, was shot five times as he walked back from the beach with his family towards his car. He has since died from his wounds.
"He's no mafioso," a friend is quoted as saying. "I believe he just didn't want to pay, that's all."
If Zakharchenko was hardly a celebrity, he was well enough known in certain international business circles. The friend describes him as a "Red Army veteran .. very good-natured, adorable" but admits that he had a previous "problem" in Russia and was the target of an earlier murder attempt in Germany.
Remind me to strike out "tranquil" and "peaceful" as appropriate adjectives for Le Lavandou. Why, Bill Taylor may even be re-thinking his plans to stop here for a few days next spring ...
one other thought on the crime may seem sightly at odds with my misgivings about Judge Denny Chin and his meaningless calculations of the appropriate prison term for Madoff. It is that among the murdering classes, hired assassins don't come so far behind genocidal war criminals, child killers, serial killers and jump-out-of-the-bush rapists (when they also kill) in challenging my lifelong opposition to capital punishment.
Recent Comments