The family of a woman murdered along with her two children have expressed outrage that the Parole Board for England and Wales is considering sending the killer to a so-called “open prison”.
Triple murderer Phillip Austin was given three supposed “life” sentences in 2001 for the brutal murder of his wife Claire, 31, and children Jade and Keiren, aged seven and eight, in 2001 — hardly a lifetime ago.
Claire was struck over the head with a mallet, strangled with her own bra, and stabbed multiple times with a pair of carving knives in a struggle which also saw family poodles Dandy and Sooty clubbed to death. Austin collected his young children from school after the killing, took them for fish and chips, and then brought them home and strangled them — crimes the sentencing judge described as “beyond the bounds of belief”.
Yet the Parole Board is now reported to be considering transferring the killer to one of Britain’s oxymoronically-named open prisons, having previously decided he could be moved to one in 2021 — often a prelude to full parole, which Austin is already eligible for, though the Board has not agreed he should be granted it yet.
“He was given three life sentences to be served concurrently, which equate to one life sentence,” said Claire’s mother, Carol Quinn, in comments quoted by the BBC.
“Life sentence — it’s a joke. He will do it again, that’s what I’m afraid of,” she said, saying the soft justice status quo was “not fair on the general public” and that her family “hope and pray that [Austin] will be kept in.”
The Parole Board has previously freed arguably even more heinous criminals than Austin, however, such as David McCreavy — the notorious ‘Monster of Worcester’ — who was cleared to be let loose among the public in 2018 despite having served just 45 years for violently murdering a baby, a two-year-old, and a four-year-old and impaling their bodies on a household fence.
The average life expectancy in Britain is over 80 years.
“Parole Board decisions are solely focused on what risk a prisoner could represent to the public if released and whether that risk is manageable in the community,” a spokesman for the Board said in a wooden statement quoted by the BBC.
“A panel will carefully examine a huge range of evidence, including details of the original crime, and any evidence of behaviour change, as well as explore the harm done and impact the crime has had on the victims,” they added — although the last of these is evidently given little weight, considering it is clear the victim’s family believe he should never be released.
“Parole reviews are undertaken thoroughly and with extreme care. Protecting the public is our number one priority,” the spokesman claimed.
In reality, governments have been regularly asked to provide the number of paroled killers who have gone on to kill again since the abolition of the death penalty by parliamentarians such as Lord Tebbit — a former member of the late Margaret Thatcher’s government — and the Board frequently makes deadly errors.
In the ten-year period from 2007/08 to 2016/17 alone, for example, freed killers killed a further 47 people — not including victims from Scotland or Northern Ireland, and not including victims in England and Wales whose killer was first convicted in Scotland or Northern Ireland, due to inadequate data collection and sharing.
Criminals transferred to “open prisons” have also committed serious crimes against the public on multiple occasions, with one notorious incident in Scotland seeing a convict named Robert Foye, who had already absconded once before, rape a schoolgirl while going on the run for a second time.
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