Liverpool attacker sentenced

[ireallycantbelievethis]

Paul Doyle, the Liverpool parade attacker, has been sentenced to twenty one years and six months in prison for his attack that injured 134 people.

That’s 258 months, or less than two months per person injured. He’ll be out in half, so 129 months served. Less than one month per person. Reading the victim impact statements was awful. One from a little boy, who is completely traumatised, stuck with me.

AIBU to think this is a farce?!

I remember when it first happened, before they said who the perpetrator was a lot of people online assumed he was Muslim/Asian etc. People were calling for riots in the streets and then when we found out who he was that was when all the bullshit "he must have panicked because the crowd attacked him" excuses started instead. I've still seen some people try and defend him now on comment threads and it's absolutely disgusting.

Do we think his sentence will be reduced on appeal?

I’ve read some unhinged stuff on MN but that really takes it to a new level.

But it literally doesn’t matter why nobody died. Every time anyone punches anyone on a night out, that person could hit their head and die but you can’t sentence them all for murder!

I think you’re belittling how big of a sentence 21 years actually is…

My DH knew him vaguely from his time in the army. Apparently he was a bellend back then, so looks like nothing changed. Just sad that so many innocent people had to suffer at his hands.

I was surprised he got as long as he did tbh. I fully agree with throwing away the key- he’s a reprehensible, violent thug but the length of his sentence was a pleasant surprise because he had already pleaded guilty and thankfully by pure luck, no one died. Presumably he would have got longer without the guilty plea?

It's hard to be certain about that. I'm not sure he woke up that morning intending to maim 134 people. It seems like a 'falling down' moment or a terrible series of dominoes. Toxic male rage and violence meets entitlement, frustration and prevention from doing what he wants, culminating in the red mist descending in the most appalling way.

I do find the sentence difficult to reconcile with what's handed out for rape and murder. I don't know whether it's an appropriate sentence, but it seems oddly harsh in comparison. I would say it is a less serious crime than premeditated rape or murder, though I know not everyone would agree. It was a stupid man having a tantrum, and it is a miracle nobody was killed. Certainly he should be imprisoned for a long time, and of course banned from driving for life. But is it worse than deliberately grooming and gangraping multiple eleven year olds? Or murdering your wife because you finally went too far when you were beating her? Killing someone you were trying to mug, as they fought back? Killing someone as you were drunk driving, or speeding? All these crimes tend to get a decade at most, often significantly less. Obviously, it's maybe the case that other crimes should be punished far more severely, but it is nevertheless a bit strange to me that in an environment where rapists get suspended sentences, he gets decades.

Why are you able to have so much sympathy with the victims who were run over but not the victims left at home?

No way his wife or his CHILDREN could ever have known he would do this. Too often families are ostracised and damned along with the truly culpable offenders. Even if they knew of his violence, leaving violent and abusive relationships is incredibly difficult and those poor people had nothing to do with this.

I would assume that although he'll technically be "allowed" to drive, he won't find an insurance company to cover him. What company would?

I think people are interested in the motivation for this sort of attack particularly because something of this scale is so unusual. You get men who flip and kill their partner or family, seemingly from nowhere, but thankfully it's very rare that they start driving into a crowd of people. As far as we know, he didn't have an ideology or plan or even a reason to target the people he hit.

I'm not sure what purpose a longer sentence would serve. We don't really do "retribution" on behalf of the victims of crime. Rehabilitation? Not really in this case as he'll probably have very little of his life left. It's not really a deterrent to others either if it really was him being out of control due to anger. It will keep him out of society for the duration of the sentence, and I guess that will test him and we'll find out if it really was a flash in the pan moment of madness or whether he is, as PP have said, an angry man who sometimes manages to hide it.

My sympathies are with his victims. I think there's no sentence that would adequately compensate them for what they went through.

What I’m puzzled about is why he was so angry before he even got close to the crowds. The footage of him shows him running a red light on a dual carriageway, driving aggressively, and this was a few miles before the parade route. It seems he was raging as soon as he got in the car. Obviously his rage got worse (and he deliberately drove into people), but what made him be in such a foul mood to begin with?

As a match going Evertonian, from a family of Evertonians, I naturally don’t think much of our loveable neighbours. However, I would NEVER get so annoyed at traffic caused by a celebratory parade that I’d start mowing people down with my car in a blind rage.

How dare you try and tar Evertonians with that brush. Any football allegiance he may or may not have is nothing to do with his appalling behaviour on that day. Get a grip!

@NightDreamer do we know how he ended up in the parade of an opposing team ?

What a nasty piece of work.

@gillefc82 of course she's not tarring all fans at all she's just pointing out there can be an intense rivalry. Not the cause but perhaps a factor.

You don't think that had she said anything, he might have responded quite angrily to her doing that? What with everybody else thinking he was wonderful and would do anything for them, with her career at risk, if he had their children in the car?

He narrowly missed causing mass murder because people were out in public. You don't think that his wife saying something about him or trying to leave him, the trained soldier, the expert in computers, the well regarded respectable man who was prepared to murder babies in prams might just have reacted quite badly to his wife contradicting his careful image?

The man who killed 10 people and injured 82 others when he fell asleep at the wheel and drove onto a train line only got 5 years.

So the sentence seems more than adequate really.

No sentence is going to take away the trauma from that day.

I thought it was a lot. But it's an interesting example of a case where the action was punished, not the outcome. There have been other cases where someone has done something quite low level but it had a bad outcome so they've had a significant jail sentence. But you think well if nobody had died, they might not have even ended up in court.

Doyle will be quite elderly when he gets out.

He was a fool - he'd had 30 years of being clean and he threw it all away in a fit of impatience.

She’s saying that him being an EFC fan may be why he did it due to the intense and vitriolic rivalry. As a lifelong Everton fan I find that offensive. I love my club, I generally dislike Liverpool FC and their fans. I would never use my car as a weapon as a result of that rivalry. To make that inference is insulting, attempts to justify his atrocious actions and just harkens back to the attitudes against football fans from the 70s/80s as all hooligans and troublemakers.

I listen to a podcast about crime/murder in the UK and a shocking number of violent murderers have got out without 12 years.
I thought his sentence was quite high actually. Rightly so, but I was just shocked given how lenient courts can be over other crimes.

Actually that was the case I was thinking of - Gary Hart. If he'd fallen asleep and hit a tree, he wouldn't have ended up in court. I thought in that case they were relieved that they could blame him and not the railway infrastructure as there were so many accidents around that time.

Falling asleep at the wheel isn’t an intentional act.

The rivalry between Liverpudlians and Evertonians is nothing like that. People support different teams in the same family - they're hardly going to want to kill each other. It is massively offensive (and the police discounted that anyway).

He'd spent the night gaming though.

We can only speculate. He may constantly be on a hairs trigger, with aggression and violence lying just beneath the surface.

There was a podcast episode of The Trial talking to Prof David Wilson about his thoughts on why he did it which is interesting.
I can’t remember the name of the condition he mentioned but it was all about anger and the need for control.