By Richard Ford August 06, 2004
WHEN Lee Clegg, a British soldier serving in Belfast, was convicted of murder in 1993, judges were faced with a new legal dilemma.
Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the former Lord Chief Justice, cited Mr Clegg’s case several years ago in highlighting the difficulties that judges face in distinguishing between the variety of motives that lead to murder, for which there is only one sentence: mandatory life imprisonment.
The sentence applies to cases such as that of the Kray twins along with so-called mercy killers.
Mr Clegg was convicted of murdering a teenage joyrider and wounding her companion. The two were shot by an army patrol in West Belfast in 1990. Mr Clegg was convicted because he fired his final shot through the back of the car when the joyriders no longer presented a threat to the soldiers.
He was released on licence in 1995, sparking rioting in nationalist areas of Belfast. The Court of Appeal granted Mr Clegg a retrial after new ballistics evidence challenged the evidence at his first trial. He was acquitted of killing the girl but again found guilty of wounding her teenage companion. Later he was cleared of the wounding charge.
Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the Lord Chief Justice, said in a lecture in 1998 that the case showed the unjustifiability of lumping all murders together and treating them all as uniquely heinous.
He said that on the facts of the first trial a life had been unlawfully taken and he should have been punished.
“But he was on any showing a young man of good character, attempting to do his duty in a predicament not of his own making, most unlikely to reoffend. It is a travesty to treat his case or even to appear to treat it as if it were in the same league of criminality as that of a contract killer, or an armed robber who deliberately shoots a police officer or a security guard, or a person who tortures, abuses and kills children for sadistic or sexual satisfaction,” Lord Bingham said.