Inclusion Daily Express -- "The Killing Of Jacob Wragg Was A Deeply Selfish Act, So Why Did His Father Go Free?"

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"The Killing Of Jacob Wragg Was A Deeply Selfish Act, So Why Did His Father Go Free?"
December 21, 2005

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND--The following four paragraphs are excerpts from an opinion piece in the Sunday Herald:

Do you believe in a hierarchical table of suffering? For instance, do you think that the suffering of a woman living her life minus legs, newly blown off by a terrorist attack, is greater than the despair of a wheelchair-using man crippled with multiple sclerosis?

If you're sensible, you'll answer that you have absolutely no idea who is suffering the most or the least, on account of the fact that there is no standard unit of human emotional pain that can be measured and quantified. We can guess and we can speculate, but we can never be sure exactly how someone is coping with his or her lot.

However, Crown Court judge Mrs. Justice Anne Rafferty is not like the rest of us. She has decided that there is most certainly a sliding scale of suffering, and employed it this week when sentencing Andrew Wragg, the father convicted of the manslaughter of his terminally ill 10-year-old son Jacob. The facts of this case are profoundly disturbing. The prosecution argued that Wragg premeditated the killing of his son, who suffered from Hunter’s syndrome, by sending his wife and other son away for the evening while he drank himself silly before smothering Jacob to death with a pillow.

Jacob's comfort or pain in this case was not of uppermost importance. It was the comfort and pain of his parents that mattered most to our esteemed judge . . .

Entire article:
"The killing of Jacob Wragg was a deeply selfish act, so why did his father go free?" (The Sunday Herald)
http://www.sundayherald.com/53378

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