mantra
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Gotcha with Gary Hughes
Discounted lives
Friday, December 08, 2006
When the doctors laid out four-year-old Danny Dell to examine him after pronouncing him dead, they found virtually no part of his tiny body free from bruising. There were bruises on his head, neck, back, trunk, pelvis, buttocks, thighs, feet, hands and forearm. Bruising to his pelvis, buttocks and thigh had been caused by beating him with some kind of implement. Bruising around his neck and the angle of his jaw was consistent with his having been forcibly grabbed around the throat.
In all there were 79 separate signs of violence or injury on his body. Danny Dell was systematically tortured to death. But the man who admitted to doing it – his father – will spend just four years in jail on top of the year he’s already done. A murder charge against him was dropped after he agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. So yet again we have a case where the value of a child’s life seems to have been discounted by the courts. Why are callous child killers getting off so lightly?
Danny Dell’s father, Shane Michael Shanks, was sentenced in Tasmania’s Supreme Court earlier this week to 10 years jail, with a minimum of five. The court was told that most of the injuries were inflicted during the two weeks prior to Danny’s death in October last year. Despite his deteriorating physical condition, his father made no attempt to seek the medical help that could have saved the toddler’s life. “Horrendous as Danny’s injuries were, they were treatable and, had he received timely treatment, his life may have been saved,’’ Justice Peter Evans said.
Last week we discussed here the case of five month old Rachel Arney, who was beaten to death by her father. Rachel was punched so hard and so often she suffered a perforated small intestine, fractured skull, broken ribs and liver haemorrhage. David Arney was sentenced to a minimum of just five years jail by Victorian Supreme Court judge Justice Bernard Teague, who said that while the treatment of Rachel was “abhorrent”, her father merited leniency in sentencing because he was depressed at the time and had since shown remorse. Arney pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
And in June we discussed 42-day-old Jackson D’Aloisio, whose father Douglas also got a minimum of five years jail after pleading guilty to manslaughter for beating his baby son to death. For half his short life, Jackson was regularly bashed and abused, usually because he cried.
So it seems that in the courtrooms of Victoria and Tasmania, the price of a child’s life is just five years in jail – no matter how much they suffered before they died - as long as the killer is willing to roll over to a manslaughter plea. Yet in those same courts the maximum sentences available for manslaughter are in the order of 20 years.
Why?
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