Beverley Allitt stood in the dock at Nottingham Crown Court on May 28, 1993, her eyes cast down, while Mr Justice Latham read out thirteen life sentences, one for each child she had harmed on Ward 4. Then he addressed her directly. "You are cunning and manipulative and you have shown no remorse for the trail of destruction you have left behind you," he said. "There is no real prospect that a time will come when you can safely be released."
A sentencing hearing is the one place in a criminal case where a judge is expected to say what he thinks. Most of what is said there is technical and is forgotten by the weekend: the length of the term, the credit for time on remand, the order of the counts. Now and then a sentence in the middle of it is short enough, and plain enough, that the reporters present carry it out of the courtroom and attach it to a name for good. Seven such remarks follow, spoken between 1964 and 2024 in Australia, Canada, England and the United States. Some did legal work. A judge’s statement that a prisoner should never be released is read by parole boards, ministers and legislatures for decades. Others did none and survive only as quotation. One was a Chief Justice’s contempt for a confession, and it helped keep two convictions in place for most of forty years. Each is quoted as the court record or the press preserved it, and each is followed to what came next.
David Birnie and his partner Catherine Birnie murdered four people in Perth, Western Australia, in October and November 1986, over about five weeks. The youngest was 15 and the oldest 31. The couple were caught when a fifth young person, a 17-year-old, reached police. Both pleaded guilty, ABC News reported, and both received life sentences in 1987. In sentencing David Birnie, Justice Wallace said that he should never be released from prison.
The remark survives only in that indirect form. His exact words were not reported, and because the pleas ended the case before any trial, far less of it was ever aired in open court than in a case decided by a jury. Graeme Scott, who prosecuted the couple and later retired as a judge of the Supreme Court, said in 2005 that the case had changed Western Australia. He compared the public’s fear at the time to the fear of terrorist bombings, and said that apart from the case of Eric Edgar Cooke it was probably the first time the state’s public had been so unsettled.
For David Birnie the remark had little left to do. He spent 19 years in prison and died by suicide at Casuarina Prison early on October 7, 2005, aged 54. At the inquest the Deputy State Coroner heard that he had gone three days without antidepressant medication because of a paperwork error. She held that the missed medication contributed to his decision, though she would not say it caused his death.
For Catherine Birnie it was never said in those words, and yet the sentence of the court acquired the same effect by another road. She received a life sentence with a minimum term of 20 years, which ABC News put as expiring in 2007. From then her case was open to review every three years. In May 2007 the new Prisoners Review Board of Western Australia refused her parole, although she had not applied. The Attorney General, Jim McGinty, said she should never be released. In March 2010 his successor, Christian Porter, accepted the board’s recommendation that she not be granted parole or placed in a program to prepare prisoners for release. Another refusal followed in 2013, and in March 2016 Michael Mischin, by then Attorney General, accepted the board’s recommendation against release on her fourth review.
The reviews themselves became the story. In 2016 the survivor who had reached police in 1986 started an online petition calling for an end to automatic parole reviews for such prisoners; the Western Australian government said in 2018 that it drew more than 41,000 signatures. In February 2017 the opposition spokesman John Quigley said a Labor government would change the law. The Premier, Colin Barnett, replied that no government would release Catherine Birnie and that taking her out of parole consideration would amount to revising her sentence.
Quigley, by then Attorney General, introduced the Sentence Administration Amendment (Multiple Murderers) Bill 2018 on October 18, 2018. It let the Attorney General direct that a prisoner convicted of serial killings, defined as two or more murders on separate days, or of mass murder, three or more on one day, not be considered for parole or a resocialization program for up to six years at a time. The government said the aim was to spare families and surviving victims the trauma of repeated reviews. Critics asked whether the scheme would reach only prisoners the board and the Attorney General would never release anyway. In 2024 Jamie Walvisch, a law lecturer at the University of Western Australia, criticized the process for lacking transparency and independence, and noted that Western Australia was the only jurisdiction to give the power to its Attorney General. In November 2024 ABC News reported that Quigley had directed that Catherine Birnie not be considered for parole before December 13, 2030. In February 2026 she was still in prison.
A judge’s sentence of 1987 had become, thirty-one years later, a statute with her case in mind. The text of that statute does not repeat what Justice Wallace said. It does what he said.
Gilbert Paul Jordan, a retired Vancouver barber, was convicted of manslaughter in 1988 in the death of Vanessa Buckner, 27, who died of alcohol poisoning after drinking with him. It is the only death for which he was ever convicted. The court held that he had supplied her with the liquor. Evidence in that case linked the alcohol-poisoning deaths of at least six other women to drinking sessions with him, CBC News reported, and later accounts put the total higher: at least seven over about 20 years in some reports, eight in an APTN report filed with the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in 2017. Most of the women were Indigenous. Jordan was never charged with any of those deaths.
The judge who convicted him, CBC News reported, called him "a predator who used alcohol as his deadly instrument of choice." The phrase was precise about the means and blunt about the man, and it had to do the work that no charge ever did for the other women, because the Crown never laid one. Jordan served six years in prison, a figure given by the literary scholar Karen Bamford in a 2010 article in Theatre Research in Canada and by the Raven’s Eye review of a play about the case. Accounts differ on the year of his release. CBC News gave 1997 in reports on new charges against him and on the national inquiry. Other reporting gave 1994.
After his release the judge’s description followed him back into court. CBC News reported that he was jailed more than a dozen times for breaching probation by drinking with women. At 68 he was held in Victoria, British Columbia, after being charged in June with two counts of assault, one count of sexual assault and one count of administering a noxious substance, alcohol, to a woman there. He was released on bail on condition that he stay out of liquor stores and not drink. Earlier in the month of the report he bought a bottle of wine, and Provincial Court Judge Michael Hubbard ordered him held, holding that drinking had played a central part in his criminal history. CBC News headlined its report on his return to custody with a single word, "Predator." At 72 he was arrested at a hotel in Winnipeg on a Canada-wide warrant after leaving Vancouver Island in breach of his release conditions. He died in 2006.
The remark stayed in the record in a second way. In 2017 the family of Mary Johns, whose death in 1982 was among those linked to Jordan, became the first family to testify at the national inquiry, the Whitehorse Daily Star and CBC News reported. They described an injustice they still felt 35 years later. Her niece told the commissioners that Jordan had never answered for her death. Her sister-in-law remembered her as "a young mother, full of life and full of promise." The APTN report linking him to eight women’s deaths was played at the hearing, the Canadian Press said. The family also asked the Yukon government for help in finding Mary’s youngest son. No court ever decided Jordan’s part in her death. The judge’s sentence of 1988 is the nearest thing to an official finding that exists, and it concerned someone else.
Beverley Gail Allitt was a 22-year-old enrolled nurse when she harmed 13 children on Ward 4, the children’s ward at Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital, over about two months in the spring of 1991. Four died: three babies and an 11-year-old boy. Nine survived, some with lasting harm. A Nottingham jury convicted her in May 1993 of four counts of murder, three of attempted murder and six of causing grievous bodily harm with intent. Two medical specialists told the court she was psychologically disturbed and suffered from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, United Press International reported. She had already been treated at Rampton, a high-security hospital in Nottinghamshire, for severe anorexia nervosa.
The parents of the children who died said they were relieved at the sentences. Whether she would serve them in a hospital or a prison was left for the minister responsible to decide. What Mr Justice Latham had said, however, set the terms for everything afterward. "No real prospect that a time will come when you can safely be released" is not a minimum term. No minimum figure was reported in 1993. The minimum was fixed later, in 2007, at 30 years, less the 1 year and 190 days she had spent in custody before sentence, the Grantham Journal reported in 2021. One 2023 report said she was told at sentencing that she would serve at least 30 years, but no such figure was reported at the time, and the 30 years came fourteen years after the remark.
That term expired in November 2021, and it changed nothing. In August 2021 a spokesman for the Parole Board told the Grantham Journal that her case had not been referred to the board and that she was not eligible for assessment while she remained detained under section in hospital. If she were judged fit to move to a prison, she could apply for parole. In October 2023 the Grantham Journal and LBC reported that she was appealing to be moved to a mainstream prison. The family of one survivor, a girl who was 15 months old at the time, opposed any release. Their daughter has permanent brain damage and lifelong difficulties with movement and hearing, LBC reported. Her father told the Grantham Journal in 2021 that "we have a genuine fear if she is freed she could walk into our lives one day." He added: "A life sentence should mean life." What she received was a set of life sentences with a minimum term, and the minimum has run out.
The case has had a second life in the inquiry into Lucy Letby’s crimes at the Countess of Chester Hospital. At the opening of the Thirlwall Inquiry in September 2024, its counsel, Rachel Langdale KC, told the hearing that Allitt’s case had formed part of Letby’s student training at the University of Chester, the Press Association reported. About 25 years after the earlier inquiry into Allitt’s ward, she said, "another nurse working in another hospital killed and harmed babies in her care." The judge’s sentence of 1993 had spoken about a single prisoner’s future. The record around it has kept answering a different question, which is what the health service did with what the case taught it.
Allan Grimson was a Royal Navy petty officer who taught firefighting to recruits in Portsmouth. On the night of December 12, 1997, he killed Nicholas Wright, an 18-year-old naval rating he had met on one of his courses. On the same night a year later he killed Sion Jenkins, 20. Neither man’s death came to light for two years. When Hampshire police questioned him in December 1999 he confessed to both killings. He pleaded guilty to both murders at Winchester Crown Court in March 2001 and received two concurrent life sentences with a minimum term of 22 years, according to the Parole Board.
The judge, Peter Cresswell, described him as a serial killer "in nature, if not by number," The News of Portsmouth reported in 2026. The same newspaper had printed the phrase differently in 2019, as "in name if not number." Two reports, one remark, and a one-word difference that changes the grammar. It is the commonest fate of a courtroom sentence that no transcript has been published for: each retelling is a small revision. What stays fixed is the idea, which is that a man who has killed twice has been placed, by a judge’s choice of words, in a category that the law of the case does not recognize. The law of the case recognizes two murders. The word "number" marks the boundary.
The minimum term expired on December 20, 2021. His first parole review ended on November 23, 2020 with a recommendation from the board that he move to open conditions, which the Secretary of State for Justice did not accept. A second review was referred to an oral hearing, adjourned on November 15, 2022 so that a separate matter could be investigated, and relisted for February 15, 2024. In November 2023 the board received an application for that hearing to be held in public, citing continuing media interest, the 1986 disappearance in Gibraltar, the seriousness of the murders and public concern about release. Grimson opposed it, arguing that a public hearing would put him, his supporters and the professional witnesses at risk, and the Secretary of State supported transparency. In late January 2024 new material from Hampshire police reached the board: Grimson was the subject of a live police case relevant to its decision, and findings made in public could prejudice later proceedings. The request for a public hearing was refused in a decision dated January 31, 2024. No release was reported.
The live police case was the question of number. Simon Parkes, an 18-year-old radio operator on the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, went ashore in Gibraltar on December 12, 1986, and did not come back. Grimson was serving on the same ship. He has always denied any part in it and was never charged, and Hampshire police closed their inquiry in December 2025, saying the full circumstances were still unknown, Forces News reported. The coincidence of the date, December 12, had drawn detectives to the case in the first place. The second question was older still. Grimson had spoken in his 1999 interviews about other young men, and photographs had been seized then. After he was sentenced in 2001 one complainant gave new interviews to police, but in 2004 officers told Grimson that no further action would be taken, The News reported. About twenty years later one matter was reconsidered after a referral to a joint police and Crown Prosecution Service panel that reviews decisions not to proceed, and prosecutors authorized charges covering four complainants.
A jury at Winchester Crown Court convicted him on July 27, 2026 of 13 non-recent offenses against four males between 1994 and 1999, twelve of the verdicts unanimous and one by a majority of 10 to 2. Some of the complainants were children at the time. A specialist prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service said afterward that the passage of time "is not a barrier to justice where there is sufficient evidence to bring a prosecution." The trial judge, Paul Dugdale, asked for reports before sentence. "There’s no doubt in 1999 you were an extremely dangerous man," he told Grimson, and said he needed an assessment of what had changed since. Sentencing was listed for November 6, 2026 at Winchester Crown Court. The remark of 2001 had said what was known on the day. The remark of 2026 asked for what would be known next.
Colin Norris was a newly qualified staff nurse when five elderly women patients recovering from hip fractures on orthopedic wards in Leeds fell into severe hypoglycemia in 2002. None of the women had diabetes. Four died. After a five-month trial at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court, a jury convicted him on March 3, 2008, by a majority of 11 to 1, of murdering Ethel Hall, Doris Ludlam, Bridget Bourke and Irene Crookes, and of the attempted murder of Vera Wilby. The Crown’s case was that each woman had been deliberately harmed while in his care. Norris has denied all five counts from the start.
On March 4, 2008, Mr Justice Griffith Williams sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 30 years, less 166 days on remand, with a concurrent sentence of imprisonment for public protection and a 20-year minimum for the attempted murder. "You are, I have absolutely no doubt, a thoroughly evil and dangerous man," the judge told him, according to reports of the sentencing. Ethel Hall’s son welcomed the sentence, said he hoped Norris would never leave prison, and called for an independent inquiry. The women had gone into hospital for help recovering from hip operations, he said, and "did not deserve to die at his hands."
The phrase "I have absolutely no doubt" is the part of the sentence that mattered over time, because doubt was precisely what the next seventeen years were about. The dispute has been a medical one: whether severe hypoglycemia in frail, elderly patients is as rare as the experts at the trial said. A 2013 report in The Courier quoted supporters saying a review by two medical institutions had concluded that "hypoglycaemia is not uncommon in hospitalised non-diabetic older people." By 2016 the campaigner Paul May, who chaired the campaign for the Birmingham Six, was representing Norris before the Criminal Cases Review Commission. "Back in 2008 it was considered to be very rare, recent research shows it is not at all rare," May told the Yorkshire Evening Post. The Court of Appeal had already dismissed Norris’s first appeal in 2009. On February 12, 2021 the commission referred the case back to the Court of Appeal.
The appeal court heard fresh expert evidence in May and June 2025. On June 26, 2025, three judges dismissed his appeals, saying, according to reports of the ruling, that they had no doubt that any of the five convictions was safe. On September 23, 2025 the court refused to certify a point of law for the Supreme Court. By then he had changed his name. The Court of Appeal judgment is titled for Colin Campbell, formerly Colin Norris. His mother told STV when the appeal began that justice for her son had "constantly been delayed and denied," and said she hoped he would regain "the freedom he should never have lost with his name cleared." He was reported at HMP Frankland in County Durham.
The two statements, one from 2008 and one from 2025, use almost the same words about the same facts. Seventeen years of expert argument sit between them. The first was a sentencing remark and the second a ruling on appeal. A reader who has only the quotations would not know there had been any dispute.
Adre Baroz pleaded guilty in February 2024 to murdering five people from Colorado’s San Luis Valley between August and November 2020: Selena Esquibel, Xavier Zeven Garcia, Myron Martinez, Shayla Hammel and Korina Arroyo. He pleaded to 13 counts in all, five of first-degree murder along with tampering, assault and kidnapping counts, after withdrawing an earlier plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Known in Alamosa as "Psycho," he was 29. The case broke open in Conejos County on November 10, 2020, during a search connected with stolen vehicles and equipment. Federal agents arrested him in Gallup, New Mexico, on November 19, 2020.
At the sentencing hearing set for May 3, 2024, District Judge Michael Gonzales gave him five consecutive life sentences. He called Baroz "pure evil" and said he had never used those words in a criminal case, KRDO reported. District Attorney Anne Kelly, who credited several Boulder County prosecutors with winning convictions against all three men, called the case "quite extraordinary" for a rural community and said no sentence could replace what the families had lost.
Unlike the Perth and Nottingham remarks, this one had no work to do. Five consecutive life terms were already the sentence. The judge’s remark added nothing to the length of the term or to a future parole reviewer’s discretion, and what it adds is a headline: the phrase, and the judge’s statement that he had never used it before, are what KRDO reported. One week later, on May 10, 2024, Baroz was sentenced in Pueblo County to the maximum 12 years for assaults on two detention deputies and another inmate, to run on top of the life sentences. "Today’s sentencing was a matter of principle because we know Mr. Baroz is going to spend the rest of his life in prison," Pueblo County Sheriff David J. Lucero said. At the same Alamosa hearing his older brother, Julius Baroz, who had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, was sentenced to 25 years. CJ Walter Dominguez, a co-defendant, had been sentenced in early 2023 to 12 years after pleading guilty to one count of tampering.
The case shows what a sentencing remark is when it has no legal function. It is a statement of how a community understood what had happened to it, spoken by the one person in the room whose words were part of the record. The sentence stands, and so does the phrase.
Eric Edgar Cooke was executed at Fremantle Prison on October 26, 1964. He was 33, a married father of seven from the Perth suburb of Rivervale, and the last person executed in Western Australia. A jury had convicted him of a single wilful murder, that of John Sturkey, an 18-year-old student, in Nedlands on January 27, 1963. Cooke had confessed to far more. He told police that he had killed eight people and tried to kill 14 others between 1959 and 1963, ABC News reported in 2017. The state acknowledged him responsible for two other murders, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The rest of the confessions were never tested by a court.
He was tried from November 25, 1963 for Sturkey’s murder only. A single conviction was enough for a death sentence. His counsel sought a verdict of not guilty on the ground of insanity and set out an abusive father, bullying over a cleft palate, repeated head injuries and time in an asylum. Dr. A. S. Ellis, the state’s director of mental health services, rejected the defense case that he had schizophrenia, and no other psychiatric specialist was allowed to examine him, the Dictionary records. The jury took about an hour and a half. He was sentenced to death on November 27, 1963.
Two of Cooke’s confessions concerned killings for which other men were already in prison. J.B., then 19, had been convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, 17, in May 1963, after a jury returned a verdict of manslaughter instead of wilful murder; he was sentenced to 10 years with hard labor, served five and a half years and was released on parole in December 1967, according to the Attorney General’s 2003 statement. D.B., a deaf young man, had been convicted of the wilful murder of Jillian Brewer, 22, in 1961, and sentenced to death, later commuted to life. The Central Western Daily, reporting in 2021, described him as having been coerced into a confession.
When the confessions came before the courts in 1964, they came as evidence in the other men’s cases. The Dictionary says the courts gave little weight to Cooke’s testimony and records that Chief Justice Sir Albert Wolff called him a "villainous unscrupulous liar." For D.B., the 1964 Court of Criminal Appeal declined to order a new trial on the strength of Cooke’s confessions, according to the Attorney General’s 2011 statement. He lost a series of appeals, including one to the Privy Council in London in 1965, and J.B.'s appeals in 1964 were also rejected, Estelle Blackburn wrote. About 15 minutes before he was executed, Cooke reportedly swore on a Bible that he had killed Rosemary Anderson and Jillian Brewer. The Law Society of Western Australia’s exhibition on wrongful convictions says the Reverend Jenkins recorded the statement and that a copy is held in D.B.'s court file.
Nothing changed for either man during Cooke’s lifetime. The Court of Criminal Appeal heard J.B.'s case in May 2001 before Chief Justice David Malcolm and Justices Henry Wallwork and Neville Owen. Cooke’s confessions were inadmissible as hearsay, so the court looked instead at the evidence of other offenses and applied the similar-fact rule less strictly because it was offered to clear an accused person, as was explained at a ceremonial sitting of the Supreme Court in 2014. On February 25, 2002 it quashed his manslaughter conviction, almost 40 years after it was entered, holding the verdict unsafe and unsatisfactory. The Attorney General, Jim McGinty, said the Chief Justice had stated clearly that there had been a miscarriage of justice. On April 9, 2003 the government approved an ex gratia payment of 460,000 dollars to J.B., then 59, the largest such payment ever approved in Western Australia, according to the Attorney General.
D.B.'s sixth appeal was heard in October 2004. The Director of Public Prosecutions questioned whether the confession was genuine, noting that it was neither signed nor dated, ABC News reported, and a Crown lawyer told the court that Cooke usually inflicted one or two wounds and broke into houses to steal, so the offense was not typical of him. On April 1, 2005 the court unanimously quashed the conviction, holding that a substantial miscarriage of justice had occurred because a retrial had been refused in 1964 in the face of Cooke’s confessions. No retrial was ordered. D.B. had served 15 years in prison. On June 2, 2011 the Attorney General, Christian Porter, announced an ex gratia payment of 425,000 dollars, describing it as an act of grace that could not fully compensate him. Estelle Blackburn, the journalist who spent years reassembling the record of Cooke’s crimes, told a radio interviewer that the expression of regret mattered even if the sum was limited.
A Chief Justice’s contempt for a witness had become the reason, forty years on, that a court was asked whether the witness had been telling the truth.
The seven remarks fall into three kinds. Wallace’s and Latham’s looked forward and were taken up by the machinery they addressed: parole authorities, ministers, then a Western Australian statute. Cresswell’s and Griffith Williams’s looked at a man and a category, and the later history is the history of whether that classification held. Gonzales’s looked at nothing but the moment. Wolff’s looked at a witness, and it is the only one in the group that a later court reversed in effect, even if the conviction at the center of the case was never in question.
None of them can be read without the report that preserved it. Latham’s words are known from a wire service filing of the day. The 2001 and 2008 remarks reached readers in two or three versions. The phrase that Wolff used survives because a biographer set it down.
• 1963 (May): J.B. is convicted of manslaughter in Perth; he is released on parole in December 1967.
• 1963 (November 25 to 27): Eric Edgar Cooke is tried for the wilful murder of John Sturkey, convicted and sentenced to death.
• 1964: the Court of Criminal Appeal declines to order a new trial for D.B. on the strength of Cooke’s confessions; Chief Justice Wolff calls Cooke a "villainous unscrupulous liar."
• 1964 (October 26): Cooke is executed at Fremantle Prison.
• 1986 (October and November): four people are murdered in Perth by David and Catherine Birnie.
• 1987: both Birnies, having pleaded guilty, receive life sentences; Justice Wallace says David Birnie should never be released.
• 1988: Gilbert Paul Jordan is convicted of manslaughter in Vancouver; the judge calls him a predator who used alcohol as his "deadly instrument of choice."
• 1991 (February to April): children are harmed on Ward 4 at Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital.
• 1993 (May 28): Beverley Allitt is sentenced to 13 life sentences; Mr Justice Latham says there is no real prospect she can safely be released.
• 1994 (February 11): the health secretary lays the report of the inquiry into the Allitt case before Parliament.
• 2001 (March): Allan Grimson is sentenced to two concurrent life terms with a minimum of 22 years; Judge Cresswell calls him a serial killer "in nature, if not by number."
• 2002 (February 25): J.B.'s manslaughter conviction is quashed in Western Australia.
• 2005 (April 1): D.B.'s wilful murder conviction is quashed.
• 2005 (October 7): David Birnie dies by suicide at Casuarina Prison.
• 2007: Allitt’s minimum term is fixed at 30 years; Catherine Birnie is refused parole by the Prisoners Review Board.
• 2008 (March 3 and 4): Colin Norris is convicted and sentenced; Mr Justice Griffith Williams calls him "a thoroughly evil and dangerous man."
• 2011 (June 2): the Western Australian government announces an ex gratia payment to D.B.
• 2018 (October 18): the Sentence Administration Amendment (Multiple Murderers) Bill is introduced in Western Australia.
• 2020 (November 19): Adre Baroz is arrested in Gallup, New Mexico.
• 2021 (February 12): the Criminal Cases Review Commission refers the Norris case back to the Court of Appeal.
• 2021 (November): Allitt’s 30-year minimum term expires; no parole referral is made.
• 2024 (February): Baroz pleads guilty to five murders.
• 2024 (May 3 and 10): District Judge Gonzales sentences Baroz to five consecutive life terms and calls him "pure evil"; Baroz receives a further 12 years in Pueblo County.
• 2024 (November): Western Australia’s Attorney General directs that Catherine Birnie not be considered for parole before December 13, 2030.
• 2025 (June 26 and September 23): the Court of Appeal dismisses Norris’s appeals; leave to go to the Supreme Court is refused.
• 2026 (July 27): a jury convicts Grimson of 13 non-recent offenses; sentence listed for November 6, 2026.