Having spent most of my adult life working to help vulnerable victims, particularly of sex crimes, to get access to justice, I do understand the desire to find a silver bullet to the problem of crime. But there's a saying in the courts: hard cases make bad law—meaning the facts of a terrible case can make us reach for simplistic solutions that feel good in the moment and go on to leave a trail of havoc when the next case isn't as hard or as straightforward. Now, sure, it feels good to lock 'em up and throw away the key on a terrible offender, except that some of them turn out to be sad people like Mr Fitzgerald in the Court of Appeal case with serious mental health problems, who offend compulsively, and whose crimes consist of still distressing but ultimately low-level offending—not good, not OK, but not worth seven years in jail. And that is exactly what has happened here, and exactly why we are repealing this bit of feel-good, no-good, ineffective legislation. 