Colman Treacy and Peter Fahey: Two Sides Of The Sanity Coin

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Colman Treacy QC in action prosecuting an attempt murder in Birmingham. All I can say is you wouldn't have wanted to come up against him.

Today - now a judge - he has weighed off the killers of Craig Hodson-Walker for 34 years apiece.

It's not enough, but it's a damn sight better than most murderers get.

Of course, it will be appealed and reduced.

Meanwhile, the other big murder story of the day was the unspeakably tragic case of Katie Summers.

Miss Summers was stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend Brian Taylor a while back. Taylor's Mad Judge®-imposed minimum recommendation was only 17.5 years - it sounds a lot, but for knifing to death a mother of four young children? Go figure.

The IPCC investigated the case after it was revealed that Miss Summers had called the cops loads of times but nothing much had happened to Taylor. This may not have been unrelated to the fact that she repeatedly refused to give evidence against him.

Victoria Derbyshire of BBC 5 Live had GMP Chief Constable Peter Fahey on this morning. She seemed to be suggesting that the police can prevent people from stabbing each other to death if only they do enough 'risk assessments'.

This seems unlikely.

Mr Fahey's favoured approach did include new, improved (ie longer) risk assessments, but also a new police injunction, whereby a superintendent could, on the basis of intelligence, ban a person from a given area. 'If he breached that injunction, he could be arrested and put in jail,' said Mr Fahey.

It's a genius idea - leaving aside the tricky question of which jail cells will be used to house these unconvicted men (and what the human rights lawyers will have to say about it).

But it seems to me that the Chief missed a trick. If you can prevent murders by creating injunctions which ban people from certain addresses, why not create injunctions which ban them from stabbing people?

FOXTROT OSCAR