Life Sentence for Murder of Burglar Stirs Debate in Britain

A reclusive farmer convicted of fatally shooting a 16-year-old burglar in the back with an illegal shotgun has become the unlikely poster boy for victims’ rights in Britain.

Tony Martin, who lived in a rundown Victorian estate called Bleak House and carried a teddy bear to court every day, received a mandatory sentence of life in prison last week for the killing. One of the dead intruder’s accomplices was jailed for three years, the other for 2 1/2 years.

The unequal punishments drew cries of outrage from Martin’s neighbors in rural East Anglia, who say a man has a right to defend his “castle” and are raising money for his appeal. Conservative politicians and newspapers have rallied to the cause--if not always to the convict’s side--ahead of England’s local council elections next week.

“What has happened to our court system when career burglars and muggers get a few dozen hours’ community service, or a couple of months in prison if they’re unlucky, while people defending their homes against the very same criminals risk long prison sentences?” asked Conservative Party leader William Hague.

The opposition leader called for a change in the law to create “a strong presumption that the state will be on the side of people who protect their homes and their families against criminals.”

Labor Party leaders have accused Hague of opportunism, and police officials responded cautiously to the idea of giving greater rights to property owners to attack intruders, fearing an increase in violent crimes to U.S. levels.

“I’ve heard comparisons to America, where there is a slightly lower rate of domestic burglary but a very high rate of violent crime and murder,” Crispian Strachan, chief constable of the Northumbria police, told journalists. “I think that is because they have a right to defend themselves at all costs. I would not want to see that introduced here.”

Guns in Britain are generally reserved for hunting grouse and game. Few police carry them, and in the wake of the massacre of 16 schoolchildren and their teacher in the Scottish town of Dunblane four years ago, Parliament banned all handguns nationwide.

Across the political spectrum, Britons express horror at what they see as America’s gun-loving culture and its result: children massacring children.

“The public and the police force as a whole are very much against guns,” a spokesman for the Police Federation of England and Wales said Thursday.

And yet there has been a great deal of public support for Martin and little criticism of his use of a gun to protect his property in Norfolk County. A Market & Opinion Research International, or MORI, poll conducted for the Mail on Sunday tabloid this week indicated that three-quarters of Britons sympathize with the farmer and 70% think that his life sentence was inappropriate. An equal number believe that judges should have more flexibility in sentencing those found guilty of murder.

The law covering self-defense says lethal violence is permissible to fend off a physically threatening attack if the victim has taken reasonable steps to avoid violence. But once a defendant is convicted of murder, a life sentence is mandatory. There is no lesser charge of manslaughter in British law, as there is in the United States.

The Police Federation spokesman argued for a clearer definition of “reasonable force” under the law. “What is reasonable force to one judge or jury may not be to another. A burglar victim’s state of mind should be taken into consideration,” he said. “This needs tightening up.”

The Times of London disagreed. In an editorial Thursday, the paper said that the case for changing the law was “unpersuasive” and that many defendants have been acquitted under the current law, which relies heavily on common sense.

The paper did, however, agree with a House of Lords Select Committee recommendation in 1989 that a manslaughter charge should be introduced for self-defense cases to allow flexibility in sentencing.

The case at the center of the controversy is a strange one. By most accounts, Martin was an “eccentric” who lived alone near the village of Emneth, about 100 miles north of London, in a dilapidated house covered in creepers and ivy and illuminated by a single low-wattage bulb on each floor.

Neighbors thought him odd but unlikely to harm anyone, although he openly expressed hatred for burglars and the nomadic families known in Britain as travelers, who he said should be put in a field surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gunned. He collected antiques and teddy bears.

His license to keep a shotgun was revoked in 1994 after he found a man gathering apples on his property and shot at the back of his car. But Martin kept a gun, anyway, which he insisted had been left in the back of his truck with a note that said he might find a use for it one day. The weapon was a Winchester pump-action shotgun, which is illegal in Britain.

Martin’s hatred, or fear, of burglars seems to have been obsessive. He told the court that he once arrived home to catch a burglar stuffing goodies into a pillowcase and that tools and electrical items had been stolen over the years. He kept three Rottweilers outside at night and, according to trial testimony, he slept fully clothed, with boots on and the gun close at hand.

The 16-year-old, Fred Barras, a traveler and petty thief with a series of convictions, told friends on Aug. 19, the day before he died, that he was going to pull his “first big job.” Accomplices Brendon Fearon, 30, and Darren Bark, 34, told the court that they knew “the old nutter” in Bleak House had silverware and other easy-to-carry antiques. They plotted the burglary and took Barras along to “keep him out of trouble.”

Just what happened inside the house is unclear, but the result was that Fearon was hit in both legs by 196 shotgun pellets; Barras was hit in the leg and back. He crawled through a window crying for his mother, collapsed 20 feet from the house in undergrowth and died.

“It is fair to say there is huge popular support for Tony Martin,” said Paul Durrant, an editor at the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich, the local newspaper of Norfolk County. “Our phones have been red-hot. Our letters bag is full of support and money for his defense.”

The paper, he feels, has taken a more balanced view. “We’ve taken the view that you have a right to defend yourself and property, but a right that has parameters around it,” he said. “People have conveniently forgotten evidence that was given in the court case.”

Some political analysts believe that the sympathy for Martin stems from a conviction among residents of the countryside that the government of Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair is playing down rural crime while cutting back on police and other services.

“There is tremendous concern about the low visibility of police and no confidence that if you have an emergency, police will be able to get to you,” said Jill Grieve, spokeswoman for the Countryside Alliance. “People are not quite sure whether justice and law are married up.”

That is the concern opposition leader Hague hopes he is championing with Martin’s case.