Valdo Calocane, the Nottingham murderer of Ian Coates, 65, Barnaby Webber, 19, and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, 19, has had his pleas of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility accepted at court on Tuesday.
Back in June 2023, Calocane repeatedly stabbed two young University of Nottingham students as they were walking back to their student accommodation. Around an hour later, he then repeatedly stabbed school caretaker Ian Coates, who was driving his van nearby. After stealing Mr Coates’ van, he then drove into three pedestrians, attempting to murder them, also.
After hearing Calocane was suffering from “serious” mental health issues, prosecutors accepted a plea of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility after he denied murder charges. Diminished responsibility (or diminished capacity) is a potential defence or excuse by which a defendant argues that although they broke the law, they should not be held fully criminally liable for doing so, as their mental functions were “diminished” or impaired.
Prosecutor Karim Khalil KC said the families of the victims had been consulted before the prosecution and decided to accept the pleas entered. However, Dr Sanjoy Kumar, father of victim Ms O’Malley-Kumar, said his daughter would be disappointed with the way the case had concluded.
“Disappointed” is one way of putting it. Maybe “disgusted” is more fitting, as it certainly is disgusting how, yet again, an evil-doer gets protected from fair punitive measures, all thanks to our broken criminal justice system.
Calocane even admitted to the attempted murder of the three pedestrians. He seemed to have the mental capacity to recognise his own murderous intent at the time, but now, like magic, he’s changed his story and conveniently didn’t understand what he was doing.
Calocane is from Guinea-Bissau and holds dual citizenship with Portugal. So, he is a foreign national, although there are no prizes for guessing that. There are two questions that need to be addressed. The first of which is why he is in this country in the first place. Secondly, if he has a history of mental illness, why wasn’t this picked up during the immigration process? Do such screening measures even exist?
Our open-door immigration policy has cost the lives of three innocent victims, two of whom had their whole lives ahead of them, and this is ignoring the long list of other victims of foreign nationals’ crimes. How many more lives must be lost before this is put to an end?
If you continue to vote for the Tories or Labour, you risk the British people’s lives. Both parties fully intend to import more criminals; the only difference is that Labour is a little more honest about it.
If you want to see an end to tragedies like this, immigration must be stopped, not reduced or put on hold, stopped completely. Only the Homeland Party has this as a policy because we are the only party that puts our people first.
