“It’s not just about his mental state, it’s about justice being done.”

I arrived in England months after Peter Sutcliffe, the terribly brutal “Yorkshire Ripper,” had been arrested.  His last victim had been killed around the corner from the apartment in which I was to live for a year.  Although I was happy and felt safe where I lived, only once did I walk down the road where her body was found.  Once was enough.  I’m not superstitious, truly, but there was a terrible feeling of grief and fear at that spot.

Sutcliffe has been in high security prison since his conviction, but that may be about to change:

The Yorkshire Ripper could be released from Broadmoor to a less secure unit after doctors reported a dramatic improvement in his mental health.

A tribunal judge has ruled that Peter Sutcliffe, 63, should be moved to ‘conditions of lesser security’, where he could even be eligible for day release.

The debate over a downgrade in Sutcliffe’s security status emphasizes the gaping divide between the ideologically driven mental health and pro-prison rights crowd, and those who believe in justice for the dead. On the one hand, you have an old-fashioned judge, apparently untainted by any excessive concern for the murder, as opposed to the victim:

Mr Justice Mitting likened Sutcliffe, who butchered 13 women and tried to kill seven others between 1975 and 1981, to a terrorist, saying the ‘brutality and gravity’ of his crimes meant he should never be released.

On the other hand, however, you have the mental health crowd, which is just thrilled that Sutcliffe isn’t, in their humble estimation, as mentally ill any more as he once was:

But last week a mental health tribunal assessing his condition came to a different conclusion, with doctors saying he was in ‘complete remission of his positive symptoms’ of paranoid schizophrenia after treatment ‘contained’ his mental illness.

Richard McCann, whose mother Wilma was Sutcliffe’s first victim, distills everything down to three simple sentences:

‘This is very unsettling. It would make a mockery of the justice system if this were to happen.

‘It’s not just about his mental state, it’s about justice being done.

Justice, however, is in short supply in the P.C., bleeding heart Leftist world, one that will always side with the living killers against the dead victims.