14/01/2011

Yorkshire Ripper Loses Appeal

Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe has lost his appeal to challenge a High Court order to be released.

The 2009 order states that he must serve a "whole life" tariff.

In 1981 Sutcliffe received 20 life sentences for murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.

The 64-year-old's appeal to challenge a High Court order was rejected by three judges at the Court of Appeal on Friday.

After being transferred from prison in 1984 suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, the serial killer is detained at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital

Last year his QC argued that Sutcliffe's mental disorder justified a minimum jail term of a "finite" number of years.

However at the hearing Lord Judge, said an examination of the "entire catalogue of the offences as a whole demonstrates that this was criminal conduct at the extreme end of horror".

He added: "We are not, of course, suggesting that the man who perpetrated these crimes was in any ordinary sense of the words 'normal' or 'average'."

The "sheer abnormality of his actions themselves suggest some element of mental disorder".

Concluding, he said: "There is, however, no reason to conclude that the appellant's claim that he genuinely believed that he was acting under divine instruction to fulfill God's will carries any greater conviction now than it did when it was rejected by the jury."

(BMcN)

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