It is sobering to read the comments of the family of the murder victim Lesley Howell. We hear so often of prisoners appealing their sentences for being too harsh or of supposed miscarriages of justice, which are often cases in which a retrospective element of uncertainty to a conviction means that it can no longer be sustained to the criminal standard of beyond all reasonable doubt (in other words, it might be that someone has to be released even though it still remains very likely that they carried out the said offence). We hear too of killers being released after serving their minimum tariff in a so-called ‘life’ sentence. So it can never be rehearsed enough how leniently life sentences operate in the UK: the person convicted of such almost never serves a full life term, and instead has to serve a tariff, which is the minimum term. For many decades this was about 13 years, but for offenders such as murderers that minimum has edged up in recent years. When Colin Howell was convicted of the murders of his wife, Lesley Howell, and of his lover Hazel Stewart’s husband Trevor Buchanan he was sentenced to life with a minimum of a mere 21 years when he confessed. Stewart, who denied murder, was convicted the following year, with a minimum of 18 years. She has now served 14, and yet keeps trying to get out. As Lesley Howell’s family say, they have no escape from their life sentence of pain, exacerbated by each appeal from a woman who shows “complete lack of remorse and [a] refusal to take responsibility for her actions”. The prime instigator in the pre-meditated murders was the evil Colin Howell. But Stewart also is a calculated murderer. Eighteen years in jail is wholly inadequate for such a wicked, wicked crime. She is fortunate not to live in a society that would have executed her more than a decade ago.