Mike,
Point taken. Barras may have been a thief who deserved a real punishment for his crimes. He was, however, innocent of anything which was deserving of what he actually got.
In the interests of balance, it must be admitted that Barras did have a string of arrests and court appearances behind him. All for petty offences. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a violent criminal.
Tony Martin’s background, on the other hand, doesn’t bear scrutiny if you want to maintain your view of him as an ‘ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances’.
This pillar of the community (known locally as "Mad Man Martin") had openly advocated putting Gypsies in a field surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gunning them. He had spouted similar racism against travellers at public meetings, though he had narrowly escaped arrest and prosecution for this. Martin was related by marriage to Andrew Fountaine, a founder of the National Front, and was a frequent visitor to Fountaine's 5,000 acre stately home, Narford Hall in Norfolk, where regular Aryan summer camps were held.
Jurors were not told that Tony Martin had a history of gun crimes which dated back more than 20 years. Neither were they told that police had earlier found a sawn-off shotgun hidden in Martin's garage.
Nor were they aware that Martin had expressed contempt for Police initiatives to reduce rural crime, and had publicly said that ‘self defence’ was the only way. The Police themselves regarded him as an unstable nutter.
But Martin didn’t just own guns. He had a track record of using them in an irrational, unstable and irresponsible manner.
In 1976, Martin shot a pigeon with a First World War revolver after a row at a friend’s house ‘while in a distressed state.’
In 1987, Martin used his shotgun to smash windows (by firing it, not by using it as a blunt instrument) at his brother Robin's house in Wisbech St Mary, Norfolk, after an argument about some property. His brother subsequently moved abroad.
In 1994 Martin fired a shot at a car – an incident triggered when he disturbed a person apparently stealing apples from his orchard. (Perhaps an apple scrumper also deserves to be shot, eh, TR?). This led to his shotgun certificate being revoked.
During the incident for which he was jailed, he opened fire with an illegally held pump action shotgun, murdering 16-year-old Fred Barras and seriously injuring Brendan Fearon. Barras was shot in the back from only 12 feet, after reportedly begging for his life. Martin then left the boy to bleed to death, without reporting the incident.
The jury decided Martin was not defending his property on 20 August but was taking the law into his own hands, and his conviction was rightly for the crime of murder. If there has been any miscarriage of justice, it is in the fact that this was reduced to manslaughter on appeal.