Triple killer Valdo Calocane is entitled to claim thousands of pounds in state benefits a year despite being detained in a secure hospital for his violent crimes, The Telegraph can reveal.
Calocane, 32, is eligible for Universal Credit payments of up to £360 a month after being sent to the high-security Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside rather than being jailed.
Prisoners are banned from claiming state benefits, but most convicted criminals ordered by the courts to receive treatment as patients in secure psychiatric hospitals remain eligible for welfare payments.
Because the court has decided – however well or badly – that he’s not criminally responsible for the crimes. He’s ill, not evil.
Yes, yes, we can all argue that that’s not the case and so on. But that is what has been decided. Therefore all those other rights remain with him.
Given the court decision we should no more stop his benefits than we should stop those of someone stuck in traction for 6 months because of a broken spine.
He is never coming out of secure hospital. Can he even spend the money there?
The strong probability is that he will be seen wandering around town in a few years time under supervised release.
You see the people who ruled that he was schizophrenic and not responsible for his murderous actions have to justify their existence by claiming to be able to treat and at last partially cure such cases.
Any individuals attacked or even killed as a result of this extraordinarily risky process will be seen as unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage. It’s just an escalation of the more general policy of letting hundreds of thousands of unvetted illegal immigrants wander freely around the country out of sight and mind until they do stuff.
Given if you have to go into a care home on State funding they take your pension away from you and use it to help pay the fees, so why shouldn’t his benefits help pay for his stay in the nuthouse, given the benefits are paid to cover his living costs (food/heat/accommodation etc), and in the nuthouse those are all taken care of? A pensioner in a care home on State funding gets to keep £28/week of their pension for their own expenditure, why should he be any different?
If I was the bureaucrat administering that hospital, I’m sure I could prove that the 360 pound per month was far too small, and the government should be paying the hospital at least 360 pound per day to accommodate this drongo.
I’d take Jim’s proposal a bit further. “Benefits” are paid by the state to the individual based on that individual’s conformity with a given list of qualifying “needs”. These payments are not some form of annuity nor are they a lottery prize but are designed to keep the recipients in modest comfort.
Logic dictates that if the state is now to look after the recipient by other means (food, housing and what have you in Colney Hatch) then you no longer fit the description that previously qualified you for benefits and they should cease.
He is never coming out of secure hospital. Can he even spend the money there?
No, but he can send it to a Jihadi group in Shitholeistan, its ‘is yuman rights, innit.*
*For the sake of clarity that’s sark, I’ve no idea if the claim is true.
What Jim and TMB said, in spades!
Just another piece of evidence, as if more was needed, to the schizophrenic nature of government decisions.
Therefore all those other rights remain with him.
Problem with rights as anything other than a technical legal concept. There are no such things as moral rights. There can only be moral obligations.
Mentioned because without the baggage of the intellectual notion of “rights”, it would be simple & uncontentious to remove the legal obligation.
A bit of research suggests that if you get pension credit (ie an actual benefit payment, not a pension) and you going into a care home then that income is taken into account when paying the care home fees, and the State contributes less. OK, the State actually pays it all, but crucially you don’t get to keep the pension credit piling up in your bank account while you’re in there.
So if its a good enough system for Aunty Ada, its good enough for murdering schizos too.
However I do know this is how the system works, because a guy I know has spent years in various mental institutions over the last 30 years and every time he comes out he’s got a nice little nest egg waiting for him as all his benefits have piled up while he’s been locked away. The local drug dealers have a ball until its all gone……….
Hospitals and care homes are not the same thing. If you think people who stay in hospital for a long time should be paying for it, or at least have their benefits docked cos frankly what are they gonna spend it on, then that’s a fair enough thing to argue, but it does need arguing and not everyone is gonna agree. It comes back to Tim’s point: “Given the court decision we should no more stop his benefits than we should stop those of someone stuck in traction for 6 months because of a broken spine.” Well maybe we should stop or cut benefits for a guy stuck in traction for 6 months too. I think it would be a hard sell to the Great British public, even if does leave a bad taste in the mouth when someone like Calocane benefits from it.
In addition to the original point, there is also the factor that the number of cases like this must be extremely low, so the sums of money involved are far too small to worry about.
The situation can be a good illustration of the maxim that hard cases make bad law. If you try to carve out an exception which applies in this case, it will be practically impossible to avoid it causing an injustice in another one.
@Charles
A fair point. I suspect that provided the injustice only applied to killers, even ones that everyone agreed were totally deranged and had no responsibility for their actions, that a lot of the population wouldn’t mind it was
unjust. But it would still be unjust.