Nicola Edgington.

This case is horrific in the extreme. Nicola Edgington who killed her mother, got released after a few years and then attempted to kill someone, then after making several calls to the Police to warn them that she was going to kill someone, murdered a stranger, almost decapitating her. She got 37 years in jail, but as the judge signed off on her sentence, he effectively blamed her and told her that she must take responsibility for her actions. The laws are there to bring dangerous people like her into hospital, and the law is there to ensure that people with a diminished capacity to prevent themselves doing terrible things, should not then be blamed when things go wrong. While a sane Edgington could feel regret, remorse and see her actions as we see them, she clearly could not.

If the law was adequate in this case, if mentally unwell people were given a habeas corpus protection, then this woman would have been arrested for threats to kill, (even though her threats were non-specific), she would have been arraigned, her case would have been argued and examined in court and she would have come into custody for further treatment. But because the law is vague and depends largely on doctors to make assessments, whilst knowing there are pressures on beds and resources, the automatic system that would have kicked in at the point at which she was seen by Police, she was left to kill and maim people instead.

Also, the Police did not take her seriously. They had her in their care and for some reason did not listen to her claim that she felt that she wanted to kill someone. This is just a mystery to me.

Lastly, this is the second case in recent months where the media have been allowed to openly discuss decapitation of victims of mentally unwell people. If one mentally ill person, decapitates someone - a stranger, and that story is openly discussed in the national media, it is the equivalent of a hundred killings by mad people, in terms of the impact on the lives of mentally unwell people who would never kill anyone, no matter how ill they are. Now there have been two horrific murders, the media have reinforced very powerful stereotypes and has made life even harder for mentally ill people, trying desperately to reintegrate into the community. Shame on the government for allowing these details into the media and shame on the media for repeating them.