The sentence was a life term with minimum tarriff 17 years. Whilst this may seem “lenient” he will not see the outside of society until his mid 40s and will lose out on what is the best part of his life (when you are normally mature enough not to act like a idiot but young enough that your mind and body remain in good shape). To me that is worse than facing death penalty.
I am fairly certain I have met Emyln on at least two occasions. The last one was I believe in October 2006 at one of the last raves in SE England I attended, where we ended up both having a friendly and intelligent discussion on whether it was worth tatting a abandoned Nortel Meridian telephone exchange out of the warehouse, I remember telling him I certainly didn’t want it and he was welcome to it (all I wanted out of there was the long red patch cable connecting it to the ISDN which I still use to this day, for the simple reason that I instinctively use a red or orange cable for a main router feed at home and work so I don’t disconnect it by accident)
I had no need for obsolete Canadian kit when I can build my own modern systems – plus I explained to him without the correct system phones and ROM packs (these last are were licensed to each system and very hard to get on the “grey” market it was scrap value, hence why it was still on the wall whilst the phones had been recovered. I remember him being quite disappointed by this news as he would have been hoping to sell it for easy money. On neither occasion did he say who he was, but he is of distinctive appearance and I can’t think of many other lads what looked like that, plus he must have known who I was as comparatively few ravers in SE England would start a conversation with a random Asian chap full of drugs about 1980s era office telephone systems – and expect a coherent answer 😉 (it would be more likely round here as BT have a research centre). That said even if he had admitted to his identity even though I thought he was a complete bell end online I’d still have told him the telephone exchange wasn’t worth tatting as Nortel had gone down like a sack of shit years before he did.
I knew he could be a sketchy, unreliable and borderline psychopathic chap but he’s hardly the first I’ve met on the party scene and there were times I myself wasn’t much better TBH. The only reason I didn’t hurt or kill anyone during darker days of my life was out of respect for my family (who would also be judged) and knowing I’d go to prison, not that I was some yogurt weaver pacificst hippy. I wouldn’t say I’m that surprised by his actions though I am a bit by his choice of victim and the age and circumstances at which he committed the crime (as it looked like he was getting his life back on track).
It is worth being aware that his involvement in the music scene and his previous for attacking a much younger girlfriend (whilst incidentally being quick to judge others with girlfriends of the same age) and also being a drug user were clearly used in Court and by the media as evidence of “bad character” and linked with other similar incidents in the same part of the UK means that everyone on the music scene will be similarly judged, same as what already has happened in the East.
