Chris Titley

No one has emerged from the Tony Martin case with any credibility. Certainly not Martin, whose sick obsession with "blowing the heads off" burglars resulted in his blasting a teenager in the back with an illegal shotgun.

Certainly not the family of the dead boy Fred Barras, who had no idea that the 16-year-old was on a burgling spree hundreds of miles from his Nottinghamshire home, until they had to identify his body.

Certainly not the anonymous person who claimed to be a Martin juror and asserted they were intimidated during the trial; a radio phone-in is hardly an appropriate forum to raise these grave allegations.

Certainly not the trial judge who, it has subsequently emerged, refused requests for jury protection.

But the people who come out worst from this whole messy affair are journalists. The reaction by some sections of the national press to Martin's conviction to murder has been deplorable. They have cynically whipped up fear and hysteria with the sort of irresponsible sensationalism that gives the rest of us our undoubtedly rotten reputation.

Bad enough are the attempts of The Sun and the Daily Mail to turn the clearly unstable Martin into a martyr of Middle England. Much worse are their campaigns to make everyone living alone fear for their safety.

Yesterday's front page of The Sun is a case in point. It placed a picture of the battered face of Mary Gill, the 84-year-old widow beaten by burglars, under the headline: "This is why Martin pulled trigger".

Mrs Gill backed Tony Martin's actions from her hospital bed, a view we will all understand. Every victim of crime, especially violent crime, wants to see the perpetrators suffer as they have suffered. But vengeance has not been used as the basis for justice since feudal times.

The Sun's attitude to Mrs Gill's comments is both unforgivable and ludicrous. It is implying that crazed vigilante Martin is a "have-a-go hero" who killed a burglar on behalf of every old person living alone. No matter that Mrs Gill does not live in rural isolation, like Martin, but in the city of Exeter. Perhaps The Sun should go further and offer a new Rover car to every reader who drags the corpse of a criminal into its London reception.

Study after study has shown that people's fear of crime is out of all proportion to crime itself. Even in this more aggressive age, our chances of being the victim of assault are thankfully slim. That is why Mrs Gill's dreadful experience is still news.

Moreover, those who are most anxious about crime, the elderly, are less likely to become victims. Statistically, young men living in city council estates are far more liable to be mugged. In rural North Yorkshire, the levels of recorded violent crime have fallen; the county remains one of the safest in the country, according to an Audit Commission report published last month.

But is it any wonder that elderly people living alone are frightened half to death when newspapers read by millions peddle this sort of alarmist nonsense as fact?

Tony Martin argued that he shot Barras in a moment of panic. The editors of such as The Sun and the Mail have no such excuse: they are guilty of scaring our most vulnerable citizens with malice aforethought.

Honk if you're on death row. The geese in Rowntree Park, York, appear doomed after their application for asylum in a Surrey bird sanctuary was blocked by Whitehall.

This is a tough break, but gives the lie to claims that the Government is soft on immigrants. Under the Tories, these Canadian interlopers would be locked up in secure detention centres before deportation. Under New Labour they must fly - or die.

If you have any comments you would like to make, contact Chris Titley directly at chris.titley@ycp.co.uk

19/04/00

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.