Clegg becomes Tory ammunition

The North wants to see more releases, says Kieran McEvoy

In Northern Ireland, the news of Private Lee Clegg's release has been greeted with anger and frustration. That it was expected has not lessened the concern of the Irish government, the SDLP, Sinn Fein and many others. They all find it difficult to believe that there were no political considerations involved in Clegg's release. All have expressed concern that his release has not been matched by any movement on the release of terrorist offenders.

Sir Patrick Mayhew continues to insist that the Clegg case can be ring- fenced and kept separate from the fate of other prisoners. Some commentators have argued that Private Clegg's three seconds of madness in which he shot Karen Reilly cannot be compared with those convicted of premeditated terrorist offences.

But Clegg was convicted of murder, a conviction upheld by both the Appeal Court and the House of Lords. Murder means mens rea, proof that there was an intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. Private Clegg personally fired the shot which killed Karen Reilly. Meanwhile there are terrorist offenders in prison convicted of murder who never pulled a trigger. Some of them were convicted under the controversial doctrine of "common purpose", along with those who did carry out murders, but they were neither master-minds nor trigger-pullers. The three convicted of murder for being on the periphery of the funeral crowd that killed Corporals Woods and Howe in 1988 are just the most notorious of many such examples.

There is no doubt that Clegg has always been treated in the same category as terrorist offenders, since he was tried in exactly the same way. He was tried in a Diplock court with no jury and altered rules of evidence, the system established for offences concerned with political violence in Northern Ireland. If the Attorney-General had wished to distinguish him from terrorist offenders, he could have descheduled the offence and Clegg would have been tried by a normal jury court, in the same way as an ordinary non-politically motivated murderer in Northern Ireland.

Similarly, Clegg's release has followed exactly the same pattern as that for terrorist offenders. The executive process for his early referral to the Life Sentence Review Board and the Secretary of State's decision to release him is exactly the same as applies to the 200 lifers in Northern Ireland's prisons, almost all of them terrorist cases. Clegg's trial and release have been formally and explicitly the same as for terrorist offenders.

The Secretary of State claims that his decision to release Clegg was not linked to politics. However, the campaign by British tabloid newspapers, two million signatures on a petition, support from senior British officials and vociferous Conservative backbenchers have made Sir Patrick's claim to impartiality hard to believe.

Sir Patrick himself took the decision to refer the case to the Life Sentence Review Board and it was he who took the decision to release Clegg after four years. For the Secretary of State to describe such a process as his "quasi-judicial" function will raise a wry smile for prison reformers, many of whom have argued for years for greater accountability and due process in what is blatantly an executive decision.

Clegg's release makes it patently clear that flexibility exists in the system for releasing life-sentenced prisoners. It would also be easy to reform the rules for the release of the other 1,000 prisoners on fixed- term sentences. Currently, they can only gain remission after serving 33 per cent of their sentences, but that could be changed very simply by a statutory instrument under the Emergency Provisions Act 1991.

It is widely believed and it has been strongly articulated by the Irish government that the loyalist and republican prisoners were crucial in calling for the ceasefire. Now, release of prisoners could provide a much-needed invigoration of the flagging peace process.

Clegg's release demonstrates that the question is one of political will rather than legal wherewithal. The Government must have known how the Clegg release would be received but, for whatever reasons, it has decided to face the flak. Release of these 1,200 paramilitary prisoners must come as part of the peace process, and it must come sooner rather than later.

The writer is assistant director of the Institute of Criminology at Queen's University, Belfast.