Blackburn father wants to meet his son's killer
Aug 09, 2010
from the article by Sam Chadderton in This Is Lancashire:
The father of a man who died from a single punch in Blackburn town centre wants to meet his son’s killer.
William Upton, 17, is currently serving half of a three-and-a-half year custodial sentence after he was convicted of the manslaughter of 24-year-old Adam Rogers, earlier this year.
Now Adam’s dignified dad Dave Rogers has expressed a wish to speak face-to-face with the Rishton teenager as part of a ‘restorative justice’ initiative.
He said: “For most people, restorative justice is a pretty new concept or they know about it vaguely.
“Ever since I heard of the idea a year or two ago, it seemed to me to be going down the right lines of making people who had committed an offence face up to what they had done.
“The best way of doing that is to come face to face with their victim.
“Human nature dictates that when you’ve done something you’re not proud of or wrong, you desperately try and find ways of minimalising it.
"We’ve all got a range of excuses we grow up with from childhood.
.... Dave said he hasn’t finalised what he would say to his son’s killer, but would want him to know ‘the kind of person Adam was’.
“I would take in some of the things we have said, and his friends have said, about Adam.
“He has to know the impact his death has had on our lives and there are questions about why he behaved the way he did and why he didn’t admit to being responsible and went down the ‘self-defence’ route.
“They are questions he does need to ask himself, if he hasn’t already.”
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Thank you for posting this story. Again, victims of violent crime are increasingly asking for restorative justice. They are hearing of the great value of restorative justice, often experienced through victim offender dialogue. <br /> <br />The door needs to be open wide for the increasing numbers of victims who ask for the chance to meet their offenders. It should not be denied. To me, it should be a "right". It is for the victims a chance to ask questions and in many cases heal---in some way, after violent crime. <br /> <br />If there are barriers to allowing these types of meetings those barriers must be removed. This is a tall order, perhaps, on many levels. Having worked intensively on the legislative level in the U.S. often I have learned that those barriers exist for political reasons. <br />But also inside our traditional justice systems there is fear of something new. <br /> <br />It's time to create the programming needed to expand restorative justice options to respond to violent, and nonviolent, crime in ways that urge direct offender accountability, whenever possible, and seek to restore victims as well as community. Restorative justice is needed. And it is needed now. This is a smart response to crime and applicable around the world. <br /> <br />Lisa Rea <br />California