Malice or Stupidity - It's One Or The Other

The unlovely 'Sun' piles into Ken Clarke today, in the following terms:-

TWO terrifying court cases sum up why Ken Clarke is not fit to sit in the Cabinet.

Case One: A thug, 17, who stabbed three teenagers and put one on life support, waltzes free from court.

Case Two: Another thug of 17, who laughed as he kicked an unconscious man so hard he cracked his bones, is given just 10 months' jail.

Both sentences are pathetic. But both are in line with the Justice Secretary's craven policy of going easy on yobs.

A real Justice Secretary would have been bellowing with rage yesterday, demanding explanations from both courts and calling for the sentences to be stiffened.

From Ken Clarke, silence.

The silence of the damned useless.

The Right are of course after Clarke as a way of expressing their rage and frustration at not having a 'proper' full-on Tory government, but nevertheless the paper has no excuse for wilfully ignoring the fact that courts are independent, and the Justice Secretary has no more business than any other minister to criticise a particular judgment or call for it to be amended, and also omitting to mention that 17 year-olds are children for the purposes of the criminal law and there are completely different rules for dealing with them as opposed to adults.