KEY POINTS:
Graeme Burton has been sentenced to serve a minimum of 26 years in prison - pending of course the almost inevitable appeal.
He joins four other men who are serving terms of imprisonment for a second killing. One is Rufus Junior Marsh, convicted of manslaughter after kicking an
old man to death in 1975, and of murder in 1986, months after his release. Another is Dennis Luke who assisted Marsh in the 1975 killing, and was convicted of murder for a second time in the early 1990s.
All five are currently serving "life" sentences - and unless the Parole Act is changed, all will eventually be considered for parole, and probably eventually released.
The Parole Board's decision on Marsh's latest application for parole in 2005 makes disturbing reading for anyone familiar with him and his crimes.
He is now in a Maori Focus Unit where he is undergoing "bicultural therapy" (whatever that might be) and "seeing the psychologist on a one-to-one basis". It is not difficult to read between the lines that after 21 years of incarceration he will be released soon.
Our judiciary is slowly becoming aware - with the help of dogged lobbying by the Sensible Sentencing Trust and public opinion generally - that there are some murderers who should never be released. Surely Marsh and Burton are two such cases.
We have yet to take the next step - already taken by Australian and British judges - of imposing life sentences in their true sense.
This could happen in one of two ways: firstly by incremental increases in sentences which, after their almost inevitable paring back by the Court of Appeal, will gradually increase to the point where minimum non-parole periods become de facto "remainder of natural life" sentences.
That road will involve the inevitable tragic loss of further lives while judges slowly accept that some murderers are irredeemably evil.
The second alternative is for a government - unlikely to be the present one - to take a deep breath and legislatively grant judges the right to impose life sentences without parole in appropriate cases.
All it would take is a one sentence amendment to the Sentencing Act: "On conviction of murder with aggravating circumstances, the sentencing judge may impose a sentence of life without possibility of parole."
In law, there is a universe of difference between the words "may" and "shall"; an amendment such as the above would give a sentencing judge the right but not the obligation to impose such a sentence.
For whatever reason(s), we have become a much more violent society than we once were.
While we debate how to change that, it is past time to recognise that reality, and allow judges to impose sentences on the likes of Graeme Burton and RSA killer William Bell which ensure they die in prison.
* David Garrett is an Auckland barrister
