Robert Brown was given a 26-year sentence in 2011. But he is due to be released in November, without parole or risk assessment. What does this case tell us about attitudes towards domestic homicides?
he facts are these. At 4pm on a Sunday, Halloween 2010, Robert Brown arrived at the Ascot house of his estranged wife, Joanna Simpson – a house that was the subject of a bitter legal battle, due for its final hearing in a week’s time.
Given these facts, this true-life horror, it isn’t surprising that in May 2011, when Simpson’s family and friends gathered at Reading Crown Court for Brown’s trial, they expected a murder conviction and a life sentence. Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, who counted Simpson as her closest friend, was one of more than 20 who had come forward as witnesses, to speak for Simpson and present a picture of escalating abuse culminating in domestic homicide.
To Barkworth-Nanton, who attended all of Robert Brown’s trial, the attitude that this was a low-status case, a “relationship gone wrong”, was evident from the start. Even though Brown had taken a weapon to the scene – which could elevate it to a higher sentence – the fact that he’d used it to kill his estranged wife in her home during a stressful divorce somehow conspired to create a lesser level of scrutiny. “We were told it would last six to eight weeks,” says Barkworth-Nanton.
The jury learned almost none of this. The night before she was killed, Simpson was working on her divorce statement. “We begged the prosecution barrister to bring it into court – it was her talking, it was the whole history of the marriage,” says Barkworth-Nanton. The barrister declined. His response, she says, was, “Trivia, trivia, trivia!”
The prosecuting barrister has since been appointed as a judge. Approached by the Guardian, a representative of the courts and tribunals judiciary said: “Judges are never able to comment on cases they have been involved in, whether this is prior to their judicial career or heard as a judge.” In response, the government has agreed to make overkill and coercive control statutory aggravating factors – but, to Wade’s alarm, not to make coercive control a mitigating one for victims driven to kill their abuser.
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