Mick Hartley

There’s something unsatisfactory for me about the recent conviction of Anthony Joseph on manslaughter charges.

Here’s the story:

For 28-year-old Richard Whelan the evening of 29 July 2005 was a normal Friday night.
He met his girlfriend in The Agricultural pub in north London for a couple of drinks after work.

Earlier that day, hundreds of miles away Anthony Joseph had been released from Forest Bank prison in Manchester.

The 22-year-old took the train to London, arriving at Euston Station. He then made several phone calls to the man he blamed for putting him in jail, threatening to kill him and his family.

When Mr Whelan and his girlfriend Kerry Barker, then aged 38, ran to catch the number 43 bus, they crossed paths with Joseph, who boarded the bus carrying a bag of chips.

Joseph, who was sitting at the back of the bus on the top deck, began throwing chips at an American woman as she spoke to her husband on her mobile.

Ms Barker reported that Joseph then began throwing chips at her and one hit the back of her head.

Several passengers chose to move downstairs rather than seek a confrontation.

But Mr Whelan was not prepared to sit down and do nothing. He got up and approached Joseph.

CCTV footage on board captured the struggle that ensued when Mr Whelan asked Joseph to stop throwing chips.

Joseph, who habitually carried a knife, became verbally and physically aggressive.

In an attack lasting no more than 30 seconds, Joseph stabbed Mr Whelan seven times, in his thigh, back and heart.

Mr Whelan followed his attacker downstairs but collapsed and never regained consciousness.

Richard Whelan had lost a friend, Ciaran Cassidy, in the 7/7 bombings earlier that month. He was, according to Ciaran’s mother, a “huge support” to her in the following weeks. “He was here from the moment Ciaran was missing.” But Whelan’s murder failed to make the main BBC news, being overshadowed by the killing of a young black kid in Liverpool by some racist thugs. And the actions of the other passengers on the bus, as the story later emerged, were less than heroic:

Then a couple of moments later the victim came down. He had blood on his shirt – not lots of it – but he was saying, “Look, he stabbed me, he stabbed me.”

What do you do in that situation? I definitely hesitated – I was thinking: there’s no way I’ll be the first person to do something here, there are so many other people about. And then, suddenly, I had a very quick realisation that no one else was going to do anything. I put my bag down and went to get my phone. Then I went to the man and said, “Sit down,” because he was sort of wheeling about, taking his shirt off and saying, “Look, look.”

But as soon as he sat down he started to go a bit floppy. I kept looking round expecting other people to engage with him as well, but no one did. I was trying to call 999 on my phone, and I think he sat on one of the fold-down seats in the centre of the bus. He started to breathe a bit heavily. I wanted him to lie down because obviously he was wounded. Things started to happen quickly. I was calling 999 and trying to get him lying down at the same time. He was quite a big guy, not huge but an adult man, much bigger than me, and at that point I couldn’t physically do both things at once, so I called out, “Can someone help me? Can someone help me?” Nothing happened. No one made eye contact. I couldn’t quite believe it.

But what concerns me here, appalling though these things are, isn’t so much the useless passengers, or the fact that the brutal murder of a thoroughly decent young man didn’t even make the main news, or the incompetence of the authorities who let Anthony Joseph loose on the streets when he should have been detained to face charges relating to a burglary offence. What concerns me is what follows on from the story above:

Mr Whelan followed his attacker downstairs but collapsed and never regained consciousness.

Witnesses said Joseph appeared to be smirking as he left the bus in Holloway Road, north London.

But his defence team argued that was a sign of his then undiagnosed schizophrenia.

The defence argument, that Joseph was schizophrenic, resulted in a first trial where the jury were unable to reach a decision. Eventually:

After a second jury failed to reach a verdict the prosecution accepted Joseph’s manslaughter plea on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Well OK, it’s always going to be problematic in cases where you have violent crimes committed by individuals diagnosed with mental disorders. We have to balance our moral intuitions about responsibility with our awareness of the extent to which that responsibility is corroded by the illness. The reason that paranoid schizophrenia is deemed to be a mitigating factor is because sufferers tend to be delusional. They may hear voices urging them to kill, or be convinced that their mother is really the devil, or be quite certain that someone staring at them is trying to control their thoughts. We hear of these stories and, appropriately, make allowances. But there’s absolutely no evidence that that was the case here. The guy was tanked up on alcohol and crack cocaine. He was throwing chips at people. He carried a knife. He’d just made several phone calls to the man he blamed for putting him in jail, threatening to kill him and his family. These are the actions of a vicious thug. There’s no suggestion that he didn’t know what he was doing when he made his phone calls, or that he thought he was throwing chips at alien invaders from Mars, or that he stabbed Whelan in the belief that he was killing Beelzebub. All we get from the defence is the line that his smirk, as he got off the bus, was “a sign of his then undiagnosed schizophrenia”. A more compelling explanation to me is that it was the sign of a disgusting and depraved human being who actually got a kick out of sticking a knife into someone who’d dared to stand up to him.

What’s happened is that the subsequent labelling of Joseph as a paranoid schizophrenic has provided carte blanche for whatever he did or does: it’s his own little “get out of jail free” card. I have no evidence one way or the other on the subject of Joseph’s schizophrenia, but it’s quite clear to me from all the descriptions I’ve read of the crime and the subsequent trial that there was nothing in his behaviour at the time that suggests that he was delusional or suffering from hallucinations. He acted like a thug, yet the court denied him the responsibility for his crimes. Contrary to the most basic principles of justice he was judged not by the nature of his actions but by an arbitrary label attached to him by the defence.

Does it matter? He’s still locked away, in Broadmoor, under maximum security. And if that’s the best place for him then so be it. That’s not the problem (though it could be , if he’s subsequently deemed to be “cured”, and let loose). What does matter is the way that experts are able to overrule common sense in what I have to see as a deeply cynical move by the defence. Considering the extent of our understanding of schizophrenia, the term “expert” needs to be in inverted commas anyway. The law is an ass to the extent that it allows our common sense understanding of personal responsibility to be overruled in this way. And Richard Whelan’s family and friends are denied the closure of the only appropriate verdict in this case – that he was brutally and viciously murdered:

Following the verdict Mr Whelan’s family said they were “very disappointed”.

In a statement they said “”the defence of diminished responsibility in this case has been used as a defence for the un-defendable, with so much evidence showing that Anthony Joseph was an angry and vindictive man.”

It added: “He has tried to excuse his actions that evening by claiming mental illness, however in our opinion he callously killed Richard for no reason at all.”

Indeed. In this case justice was not done.

[Full disclosure: both Richard Whelan and Ciaran Cassidy were known to my son.]