Category: law and literature

The Killing of a Murderer – a Rebalancing of the Order of Things?

David Gurnham, 15 April 2026     7 mins read

On 7 March 2026, I caught a BBC television news headline reporting that the murderer and former school caretaker Ian Huntley had died in prison following severe head trauma inflicted by a fellow prisoner at HMP Frankland, Country Durham, in an attack a week or so previously. The newsreader having given this much of the story, I expected the report thus introduced to offer more about the incident itself: at the very least some details about the man suspected of killing Huntley and facts so far established about the circumstances and conditions at the prison.

But the report (by the BBC’s Senior UK Correspondent Seema Kotecha) was not like that at all. Her full story, taking precisely two minutes of airtime, ran thus:

Soham in Cambridgeshire, an ordinary Sunday in August. Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells were best friends. Mad about Manchester United, this photo was taken by Holly’s Mum that afternoon. At around six, they left Holly’s home, it’s thought to buy sweets. The search lasted 13 days; more than 400 officers took part. Amid huge public concern, it became one of the biggest operations of its kind. A school caretaker, Ian Huntley, said he had seen the girls before they disappeared.

His girlfriend Maxine Carr was Holly and Jessica’s teaching assistant. The girls’ bodies were finally found by a gamekeeper, dumped in a ditch around 10 miles from Soham. Huntley was arrested the same day. He’d lured Holly and Jessica into his home, claiming his girlfriend was inside. He was sentenced to life with a minimum of 40 years, the judge said his continuing lies and manipulation had deepened the family’s suffering.

Maxine Carr, who’d given him a false alibi, was sentenced to three and a half years for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Huntley, as one of Britain’s most notorious prisoners, was always a target. He was slashed across the throat in 2010, needing 21 stiches. The man who senselessly stole the futures of two happy, carefree girls enjoying their summer holidays.

I found it odd that the BBC report seemed to be so reluctant to talk about Huntley’s own death, a reluctance apparently reflected the general attitude of people of Soham as reported in another BBC story from the same day: that ‘he’s not worth their breath or time’.

Having listened to the report, my attention must have been taken away to something else, because it was only when coming back to it a month later that I found that it had been followed up with an interview with Danny Shaw (former BBC journalist and crime and policing commentator) who had elaborated on some of the facts of the instant case that I had expected to hear in the initial report.

Shaw also mentioned certain contextual matters: that the same prison had seen a serious attack on prison staff by Hashem Abedi in April 2025, and that there had been a sharp rise in the number of prisoner deaths by homicide in the UK in 2025 and 2024 (as reported by the Ministry of Justice). He also noted that the principle of rehabilitation is undermined in the case of prisoners serving a whole life term (as Huntley’s alleged killer was) since they have ‘nothing to lose’ by further offending.

But the first minutes of his contribution, too, continued in the same vein as Kotecha’s, reminding viewers of the ‘shocking’, ‘brutal’ and ‘evil’ nature of Huntley’s own crimes and his attempts to ‘manipulate’ both the girls, and afterwards, the media as well. Like Kotecha, Shaw framed death of Huntley through the truism that the latter was, after all, ‘always going to be a target because of the crimes he committed’.

I wonder how many viewers of the BBC news on 7 March watched this item to the end and thus heard the discussion at the end of what happened to Huntley at HMP Frankland, and how many, like me, caught or noticed only the first part in which nothing at all was said about it. The programme editors may rightly believe that making Huntley’s crimes in Soham in 2002 the first and central focus was a necessary reminder of why his death is newsworthy now, and to ensure due respect is paid to the memory of the child victims, their families, and members of the community affected.

I believe the BBC’s presentation of the item, and especially the text of initial report, throws some troubling light on our ‘cultural imaginary’ of crime and punishment.

The first is the way it speaks to a ‘displacement’ of justice into informal channels which, while often frighteningly uncontrolled and brutally violent, may not be entirely unpredictable or even necessarily intolerable. The presentation of Huntley’s case, for example, conveys an implicit expectation that   vengeful emotions will from time to time escape from their official (legal) constraints, and that this is itself part of what is popularly understood as ‘justice’ for society’s most reviled characters.

The release of Huntley’s girlfriend Maxine Carr with a new and secret identity, for example, precipitated several incidents of other women being mistaken for her and being relentlessly harassed, threatened, and abused by people who believed that ‘justice’ in her case too required much more than a few years in prison.

As for Huntley: ‘He was slashed across the throat in 2010, needing 21 stiches. The man who senselessly stole the futures of two happy, carefree girls…’ The juxtaposition of those sentences may not quite amount to tacit approval of the murder of a child-murderer. But they do seem to affirm a natural causal relation, and insinuate that the two crimes so separated in time represent a rebalancing of the order of things in a way not antithetical to justice’s values of desert and retribution. After all, the ‘retributive’ justification for punishment is retrospective, and the report – in its determination to focus only on that ‘ordinary Sunday in August’ of 2002 – implicitly participates in that punitive orientation back to the original crime.

The second point, which flows from this retrospective quality of the report, is the theme of genre and how genre tropes and conventions are used in ways that tell us something about the imagined role and responsibility of law and criminal justice. When I reflect on my own surprise at the lack of focus on Huntley’s death in the initial BBC report, I realise that this was the result of certain generic assumptions that I had made – mistakenly, as it turned out – upon hearing the initial headline.

I had imagined that the piece would follow the genre conventions of crime reporting, hence my expectation to hear details about the crime that had just been discovered taking precedence over the crimes committed 24 years previously by its victim. Instead, the report invokes a trope from an entirely different genre and thus a wholly different set of conventions, namely the retrospective: a staple of genres such as the memoir, biography (or in this case ‘geography’), and obituary. There may be various reasons for this, but I suggest that it allows the report to reflect a view about the ‘proper’ role of law with respect to ‘doing justice’ and its limits in respect of the ‘underserving’.

Notice that the vast bulk of detail given in the report concerns law’s positive and energetic involvement action in service of the ‘real’ victims of the ‘happy, carefree girls’, their families, and the local community of Soham, some of which Shaw then repeated in his interview:

‘The search lasted 13 days … it became one of the biggest operations of its kind … Huntley was arrested the same day … sentenced to life with a minimum of 40 years … Maxine Carr, who’d given him a false alibi, was sentenced to three and a half years …’.

By comparison, law’s involvement in Huntley’s death is not only minimised, but almost entirely set apart from it.

He was ‘always (going to be) a target’ on account of his own ‘senseless’ crimes, and an object of such understandable and widely shared hatred that his own violent end at the hand of a determined executioner could hardly be delayed forever.

Rape Myths and Medusa’s Gaze: a story of windows and mirrors

It is a little while now since the media storm surrounding the Ched Evans rape case died down following the footballer’s acquittal at retrial. Since that time, attention has moved on to a much larger story about alleged sexual wrongdoing in Hollywood, and the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein may well also turn on the issue of consent and the relevance or otherwise of complainants’ sexual histories. Such cases force us to confront difficult and important questions about what the interests of justice require to be made visible and must be kept hidden from view. In an article published just now in the International Journal of Law and Context (‘Ched Evans, Rape Myths and Medusa’s Gaze: a story of windows and mirrors’), I discuss some ways in which the legal debate about defendants seeking to discredit a complainant using details of the latter’s sexual life is itself part of a larger voyeuristic culture. The article considers the decisive second Evans Court of Appeal judgment, and this post offers some reflections that draw on that article.

Appeal judgments often offer up narrative details that seem irrelevant to the legal point at issue, but in fact tell of a deeper significance. Hallet LJ described two men who, on the night in question, sought to watch and film the defendant, his friend, and the complainant (‘X’) through the window of the ground floor hotel room where the incident was taking place. Their efforts were thwarted at a certain point when the curtains were closed. Does this scene not perfectly capture the essence of the case as a whole: the complainant’s identity concealed on one level by curtains as if in a private theatre, and on another by her designation in the legal judgment euphemistically by the letter ‘X’ – that signifier of censored content that simultaneously veils and draws attention? If the vignette of two men peering through a window mirrors a broader cultural voyeurism that surrounded the case, then so too did the Court’s own framing of the legal issue in terms of the justifiability of ‘indulg[ing] in a forensic examination of [X’s] sexual behaviour with others’ [para 74]. As we know, the Court did indeed decide that such ‘indulgence’ was justifiable, on the basis that the testimony of X’s purported acts of consensual drunken, rough and loud sex [paras. 12, 13, 24, 33, 35, 39, 52, 56, 58, 71] – constituted relevant and admissible evidence that a jury could well regard as corroborating Evans’s own testimony that X consented.

What the Evans judgment seems to affirm is something long argued by commentators of variously feminist positions: that there is a certain relationship between the power of visual spectacle and the imperatives of justice that, placed in the context of our existing gendered norms about ‘proper’ sexual behaviour, may disadvantage women. In this case, the evidence in question indicated that X was a violator of traditional feminine norms: that far from a sexual ‘gatekeeper’ of men’s morals X was an aggressive initiator of casual sex, and thus more masculine than feminine in terms of traditional gendered sex roles. Much was written at the time of retrial on how this fact engages the myth referred to by Hallet LJ herself, that ‘unchaste women are more likely to consent to intercourse and in any case, are less worthy of belief’ [para. 44]. Indeed, beliefs of this kind – well exploited by Evans’s defence team in soliciting the fresh evidence – are reinforced by a ‘just world’ philosophy: that ‘bad girls’ like X have no cause to complain about the consequences of their own risky and disapproved-of sexual behaviours.

If it is the case that the Court’s judgment may have reinforced such myths then this is of course a serious matter. However, the judgment is instructive furthermore about what criminal justice ‘sees’ when it turns its gaze on a case like Evans’s. It is to this issue that I want to get, which takes us some way beyond the usual debates about rape culture and what a ‘not guilty’ verdict really means. In finding its way to legitimising ‘indulgence’ in the sexual details of X’s private life, the Court reminds us of that image with which we started: of those tawdry observers peering through the hotel window, hoping to catch a glimpse of X and who understand her only in terms of an object for view. The Court, like those gawping men, thus serves as a mirror of cultural prejudices rather than a means by which to dispel them. This affords an explanation for lingering dissatisfaction (at least among ‘elite opinion’) with the retrial verdict: not on account of the factual question of whether Evans really did rape X after all, but rather the confirmation that the criminal justice gaze is ally to the voyeuristic and objectifying male gaze.

If the Evans judgment represents any sort of failure on the part of the judiciary then, it is a failure of the imagination: to imagine a view from the standpoint of the supposed ‘object’. Finding ways towards accommodating alternative perspectives is one of the key contributions of ‘law and humanities’ approaches to legal studies. What we need is criminal justice that has the imaginative capacity to countenance the object of its gaze ‘looking back’ – that is cognisant of the dangers of objectification and that makes room for something of the spirit of the mythic Medusa. In that myth, the hero Perseus knew that while he looked at Medusa only in the reflection of his polished shield, he was invulnerable to her monstrous feminine gaze. If rape myths are a kind of ‘shield’ that reinforces the male gaze, then the story of how Perseus killed Medusa seems perfectly to literalise that. The aims of feminist critiques of rape myths have tended to rehearse that struggle: to, so to speak, render Perseus’ shield transparent somehow and thereby to force dominant masculinity to reckon with another perspective on the question of what it means to do justice for both defendants and complainants.

David Gurnham, Professor of Criminal Law and Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, Southampton Law School