The Huw Edwards case exposes the sickening priorities of our justice system

If you want to gain an insight into the warped priorities of England’s criminal-justice system, just look at how it treats the possession of child-abuse images compared with expressing offensive views online.

Disgraced BBC presenter Huw Edwards was handed a suspended sentence yesterday, meaning he has been spared jail. He pleaded guilty in July to three sexual offences, related to making (the legal term for possessing or accessing) 41 pornographic images of children. Seven were Category A images – the most serious form of child-abuse images, which depict ‘penetrative sexual activity’. One of the images in this category was a video featuring a nine-year-old boy. These sickening images were sent to Edwards between 16 December 2020 and August 2021, when he was still the BBC’s top news anchor.

Strikingly, Edwards’s sentence is not unusual in child-pornography cases. Seemingly every pompous legal commentator in the land has taken to X or to the airwaves to insist that this is not an example of ‘two-tier justice’ and that the public’s anger at the sentencing is misguided and ill-informed. The mitigating circumstances in Edwards’s case – such as his early guilty plea, lack of previous offending, poor mental health and ‘complex’ character – mean a suspended sentence was entirely ‘normal’, they say. Some of the specific mitigating factors – in particular, that Edwards supposedly felt like an outsider at the BBC for failing to get into Oxford – sound preposterous to a layperson like myself. But the broader question the trial surely raises is should it really be normal to walk free after accessing child sex-abuse images – especially when so many lesser crimes attract custodial sentences?

Indeed, the lenient sentence handed down to Edwards for accessing child-abuse imagery stands in stark contrast with the extremely harsh sentences that have recently been handed out for making offensive statements online.

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Read also: The Huw Edwards scandal shows that the BBC never learns by Jonathan Maitland, Spectator