EARLY RELEASE 'A BETRAYAL' OF VICTIMS FAMILIES

Moves to ease prison overcrowding are insult to our loved ones, say relatives

- MICHAEL KNOWLES Home Affairs Editor

FREEING killers and abusers early from jail has left the families of victims feeling “betrayed, silenced and forgotten,” they say.

They believe the Government is more concerned with jail overcrowding “than standing with those left behind”.

Labour is ramming through sentencing reforms that will release killers, violent sex offenders and child abusers even earlier – in the face of calls to better protect victims.

Criminals sentenced to more than four years will be out after serving just half their term. But those they have bereaved say this will deepen their trauma, put more people at risk and hammer confidence in justice.

Glenn and Becky Youens, whose daughter Violet-Grace, four, was killed by a stolen car doing 83mph, said: “The moment they told us she was gone, our lives stopped. The man who killed our daughter took everything from us.

The sentence he got could never make up for what we lost, even if he had received a longer sentence.

"Now, under Labour's new plans, people like him could be released even earlier. How can that be right? "How can any government look parents in the eye and say the person who killed their child deserves to walk free sooner?" Hit-and-run driver Aidan McAteer, who was 23 at the time of the 2017 crash, in a 30mph zone in St Helens, Merseyside, was jailed for nine years and four months. He admitted causing death and serious injury by dangerous driving.

He is now free. Becky and Glenn successfully campaigned for Violet's Law to toughen sentences for people who kill through dangerous driving.

But they say: "These reforms insult everything we fought for." Katie Brett's sister Sasha Marsden, 16, was sexually assaulted, stabbed dozens of times and set on fire by hotel barman David Minto, 35, in Blackpool in 2013.