Editorial: The handling of the Tony Martin tragedy showed the confused sentencing response to certain crimes

​As we report on page two, the farmer Tony Martin has died. It is more than a quarter of a century since Mr Martin, whose life has come to an end at the age of 80, was jailed for shooting dead a teenage burglar.

Anyone who followed the news back in 1999 will remember the case. Mr Martin served three years in prison after shooting Fred Barras, 16, at his home in Norfolk. He was initially found guilty of murder, but this was reduced to manslaughter on appeal.

In some respects it was a complicated case, provoking a fierce national debate about the measures homeowners can take to defend their property.​

Attitudes have changed relentlessly over the centuries towards our approach to criminals. In the earliest surviving News Letters, for example, there are occasional reports of multiple public hangings of criminals for thefts such as stealing animals. It seems brutal now, and indeed so began to repel the public in the early 1800s that juries would not convict such thieves if they thought it would lead to the death penalty (which was in fact removed in such cases). But in the early 1700s the theft of a horse, for example, could be ruinous to the owner.

No-one wants to go back to such times and such savage punishments, or anything like it. Nor do many people in Britain want to get into a situation such as prevails in America, in swathes of which there is a widespread feeling that killing someone accidentally in defence of your property is a reasonable error to make, particularly if the intruder had criminal intent. The US has an entrenched culture of gun ownership, and far more homicides per head of population than us.

At the same time, however, western European countries have sunk into utter confusion on sentencing. We are getting tougher on sex crimes, but softer on theft, some of which is barely investigated. We are far too soft on some crime.