I couldn’t let this one slip by without re-printing it here. (Thanks to Rory O’Neill, editor of Hazards magazine, for permission to use such articles from Risks, the TUC’s weekly online bulletin for safety reps and others.)
Safety campaigners have reacted furiously after the death of a rabbit was treated more seriously by the courts than the death of a construction worker. Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK), which speaks for the bereaved relatives of workplace fatality victims, was speaking out after Discovery Homes (Scotland) Ltd was fined £5,000 and the firm’s director Richard Pratt £4,000 on 8 June after the death of employee Andrezej Freitag. On the same day Steven Appleton was jailed for causing unnecessary suffering to a rabbit at Magistrates Court in Caerphilly after he stamped it to death. He received a six month custodial sentence. FACK member Sharon Norman, whose father Gordon Field was crushed to death at work, has written to prime minister Gordon Brown to protest. She said: ‘When I read the two news reports and the outrageously different penalties handed down by our courts to the killer of a rabbit and the killers of a man, I was so angry and I had to email the prime minister. I asked him to explain to me how this could be right.’ She added: ‘Every year many more people are given custodial and suspended sentences for animal cruelty than have ever been given such sentences for killing a worker. We don’t condone animal cruelty but cruelty to people that devastates families must surely be more serious?’ She added it took three years after her dad was killed at work for his negligent employer to be fined, ‘yet the rabbit killer was tried, convicted and sentenced in a few months.’
A dead rabbit gets swifter, better justice
13 June, 2009 — handsignsI couldn’t let this one slip by without re-printing it here. (Thanks to Rory O’Neill, editor of Hazards magazine, for permission to use such articles from Risks, the TUC’s weekly online bulletin for safety reps and others.)
Safety campaigners have reacted furiously after the death of a rabbit was treated more seriously by the courts than the death of a construction worker. Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK), which speaks for the bereaved relatives of workplace fatality victims, was speaking out after Discovery Homes (Scotland) Ltd was fined £5,000 and the firm’s director Richard Pratt £4,000 on 8 June after the death of employee Andrezej Freitag. On the same day Steven Appleton was jailed for causing unnecessary suffering to a rabbit at Magistrates Court in Caerphilly after he stamped it to death. He received a six month custodial sentence. FACK member Sharon Norman, whose father Gordon Field was crushed to death at work, has written to prime minister Gordon Brown to protest. She said: ‘When I read the two news reports and the outrageously different penalties handed down by our courts to the killer of a rabbit and the killers of a man, I was so angry and I had to email the prime minister. I asked him to explain to me how this could be right.’ She added: ‘Every year many more people are given custodial and suspended sentences for animal cruelty than have ever been given such sentences for killing a worker. We don’t condone animal cruelty but cruelty to people that devastates families must surely be more serious?’ She added it took three years after her dad was killed at work for his negligent employer to be fined, ‘yet the rabbit killer was tried, convicted and sentenced in a few months.’
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