United Kingdom: Should a ‘Great Train Robber’ go free?

Britain is governed by “people who appear to be either congenital idiots or morally bankrupt,” said Simon Heffer in the London Daily Telegraph. Last month, Justice Secretary Jack Straw wisely refused to grant parole to Ronnie Biggs, one of the Great Train Robbers, on the grounds that Biggs was unrepentant. But last week, he changed his mind and ordered Biggs freed on “compassionate grounds,” saying the 80-year-old was dying and should spend his last days with his family. The decision is “contemptible.” Biggs took part in a violent heist that came to be known as the Crime of the Century. In 1963, he and 14 accomplices stopped a mail train, clunked the driver over the head, and made off with 2.5 million pounds—some $50 million in today’s dollars. Sentenced to 30 years, he escaped after 15 months and fled to France, Australia, and finally Brazil.

Biggs built an entire career out of “cocking a snook at the British authorities,” said Alan Palmer and Emily Nash in the London Mirror. He had a Brazilian child, which ensured that he could not be extradited. But he had no money with which to support this new family. So he sold photos and autographs to British tourists and tabloids. “The press would pay for a shot of him thumbing his nose at British justice.” Tourists could even purchase the Ronnie Biggs Experience, “which meant buying him dinner and all the beer he could drink” while he told the tale of the robbery. In 1978, the punk band the Sex Pistols flew to Rio to be photographed with him. As years passed, though, his notoriety waned, and so did the money it brought. Biggs suffered several strokes. In 2001, he returned to Britain at age 72 and turned himself in.

That was just another self-serving act by a “nasty petty criminal,” said George Pitcher in the Daily Telegraph. Biggs needed the medical treatment he would get for free in prison. It was disgusting to see him posing for photographs at his birthday party this week, “like some national treasure.” The man delights in playing the “lovable rogue,” but in truth he is “a monumental shyster, who used and abused those closest to him.” Biggs abandoned his wife and children in Australia to flee to Brazil. When his Brazilian girlfriend got pregnant, he told her to have an abortion, only reversing his decision when he learned that fathering a child would save him from extradition. The boy ultimately made piles of money as a child pop star, money that Biggs squandered. His was a life “committed to serving his own narrow selfishness.” Setting him free is a travesty of justice.

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Ease up, said David Knight in Scotland’s Aberdeen Press and Journal. Biggs is a sick old man. He was denied parole because he hadn’t repented, a condition “presumably linked to the rehabilitation aspect of prison.” But rehabilitation doesn’t really apply to an 80-year-old. Besides, if he had robbed that train today, he surely would have received a much lighter sentence. After all, modern British sentencing laws give a murderer just 25 years, and though the train robbers injured the conductor, nobody was killed. “If his release was to be truly compassionate, maybe it should have been slightly earlier, to allow him some brief quality of life rather than none at all.”