No one will have been upset by the twenty-eight year minimum sentence imposed upon two ruthless, sadistic killers who beat Jody Dobrowski to death for no better reason than because they disapproved of his lifestyle.

This is the first occasion upon which a judge had weighed the issue of homophobia in determining a minimum term.  As reports Dominic Kennedy of The Times today,

“The sentencing heralds a new era when murderers motivated by their victims’ sexuality will be jailed for twice as long as those convicted of other murders. Similar heavier penalties apply when the ground for murder is race, religion or disability”

It now seems that Stonewall, the gay rights group which campaigned for heavier than usual penalties for crimes involving homophobic hate crime, will now press for incitement to hatred of gays to be outlawed.

Call me self-centred, but I feel distinctly undervalued by virtue of the fact that had the defendants beaten and kicked me to death, the extinction of my life should have resulted in a substantially shorter life sentence being imposed, because I do not fall within one of those self-certified, minority, perceived victim groups.  Murder is murder.  It is discriminatory for a murder to be deemed more serious simply because the victim was singled out due to the fact that he was of a different race or gay.  Though single issue activists will argue that the murder of a victim simply because he was gay or of a different ethnic background is worse than when the killing was just because the victim wore the wrong football supporters’ scarf or was wealthy or whatever, they are utterly wrong.  The killers Thomas Pickford and Scott Walker richly deserve their twenty-eight year prison term, but that sentence should have applied no matter who they had killed in that manner.