Rhys Jones’ teen killer shouldn’t be able to swan out of jail in his mid-20s
A wicked thug
THE Sun always hoped the sickening murder of Rhys Jones would change Britain.
We demanded then a radical rethink by politicians and judges over the derisory sentences given to young thugs.
We were appalled that teenage killers could carry out terrible crimes but still swan out of jail in their mid-20s with their whole lives ahead of them.
Yet 13 years on there is the danger that could happen with Rhys’s own murderer.
Smirking Sean Mercer is not the model prisoner he aims to sell to the judge due to review his sentence.
He has routinely flouted the law from his cell using an illegal mobile to scroll Instagram and chat up a girl — enough on its own for two more years behind bars.
That aside, Mercer was a pitiless, swaggering, gun-toting gangster who murdered a boy of 11.
He got life in 2008 with a minimum of 22 years and no parole until at least 2030.
There is no reason to soften that.
Rage on right
SOME Tories must get a grip.
Without further damning revelations, Boris Johnson seems vanishingly unlikely to sack Dominic Cummings. They have endured worse flak together. Why, then, are so many Tory backbenchers leaping on the “Cummings must go” bandwagon?
A few perhaps hope that Boris would postpone the final Brexit moment with his chief aide gone.
Others are discombobulated by their constituents’ anger.
All apparently prefer the distraction of this soap opera to focusing on the economic juggernaut about to hit them.
The Tories have FAR greater problems than the Cummings saga.
If MPs are already panicky over the first dip in their polling, wait until four million are on the dole and the gravest recession of our lives has engulfed us.
They should worry more about trying to keep their constituents in work than about writing self-indulgent protest letters in the desperate hope those voters still regard them fondly in 2024.
Conquer Covid
IT will be tough to self-isolate even if you have no Covid symptoms — but we must if the NHS tells us to.
The major contact-tracing programme launching tomorrow is our best chance of driving the virus back down to even lower levels and rapidly returning life to near-normality.
MOST READ IN OPINION
If we are told we have had contact with a known sufferer, we will have to do our duty and stay put.
This scheme — plus the antiviral Remdesivir, which could shorten recovery by several days — both look like potentially major breakthroughs in the battle against the disease.
We can only hope the drug works. But we can all ensure the success of the first.
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