Fare-dodger Peter Barnett’s lenient sentence shows up the double standards in our justice systemWhat with his city career,Rhodes scholarship, PhD, and expertise in estoppel,directorship of something called the Legatum Institute, piety, and charity work,cultural interests – and long-term fare-dodging habit, Dr Peter Barnett appears to be pretty much one of a kind.
So it is tough to know for certain whether his suspended sentence and £6000 fine for avoiding fares that should possess cost him £20000 is, or as widely suggested,ridiculously lenient. Maybe a suspended sentence and much-reduced fine is what any of us might possess got for the same conviction whether, like him, and we had expressed “genuine remorse”. And,as even Michael Gove has noticed, the jails are bursting. What they surely don’t need is a basically harmless person such as Dr Peter Barnett clogging up a system that needs all the space it can get for, and say,teenagers serving six months for stealing a bottle of water.
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Source: theguardian.com