From a correspondent in the UK: A group of teenage boys gang rape two girls on two separate occasions, film the crimes and laugh about doing it. As a punishment, they are condemned to community service, with Mr Justice Nicholas Rowland explaining at Southampton Crown Court last month that ‘I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.’

The decision did not go down well with the public, many of whom have grown restless at court decisions, and struggle to understand sentencing guidelines which seem alien to natural justice.

The judge has stayed true to form; in 2023 he handed out a suspended sentence to a paedophile found with the most serious grade of child abuse images, despite five previous convictions. (As it is, the offender failed to abide by the conditions of his suspended sentence and went to jail anyway.) Most people would regard unpaid work as a small price to pay to avoid prison, but many criminals are not future orientated enough to see things that way.

In the more recent case, the judge chose to be lenient because the two rapists were not only young, but too stupid to understand what they had done. This is not unusual – many vicious and violent criminals escape serious punishment because the law sees low intelligence as mitigation. They are “unfit” to be tried, to be held accountable for their actions. However evil those actions are.

Indeed, it’s curious that two factors which now routinely lead to lower sentences – or, in the case of the teenage rapists, no punishment at all – are arguably good reasons to keep offenders in for much longer, since both youth and stupidity are suggestive of a higher risk of reoffending.

This sort of corruption is scarcely limited to the UK. Just in the news: the “suspect” in the North Carolina light rail murder by knife of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, has been found incompetent to be tried, by a federal judge. The killer (video recorded) faces federal charges (including first-degree murder and other federal offenses) for the August 2025 attack. But on 9 June 2026, a US Attorney announced that Brown was deemed “unfit for trial” at this time, though his prognosis for regaining competency is considered “good.” So the judge set a four-month deadline for the thug to undergo competency evaluation and treatment while he remains in jail. 

It can be (and has been) argued that anyone who takes another human’s life without severe provocation is insane. And by definition, clearly unable to distinguish between right and wrong. Does that, however, diminish their responsibility for their actions? Even if a person has a firm, fixed belief that traffic speed limits do not apply to them, this does not prevent them from being fined and if determined by “competent authority” imprisoned: that is, convicted of more than just a petty offense. So why do we have this situation with those who are “incompetent” are not accountable?

And indeed, we see more and more of those who claim to pursue “justice” declaring that no one who kills another, or even rapes, tortures, maims, disfigures or otherwise harms another, should be punished. They should only be “treated.” No doubt the attorneys defending Brown will argue that. And it is highly likely a judge will agree.

(At the same time, we note that often these are the same people that proclaim that if someone is offended by something said, the offensive speaker must be punished.)

As many of us who are christian in belief point out, this is contrary to the standard that the Creator set for human government to be an acceptable (or at least, tolerated) human institution: does the ruler praise and honor those who do good and punish those who do evil?

In the New Testament, Jesus shares the parable of the “wicked judge” who refused to hear the plea of a widow. Until she exhausted him with appeals for justice. Today, the nature of wicked judges seems to have expanded to letting the wicked, the evil-doers, escape justice.