‘Imagine this was your daughter’: how grieving mothers campaigned to close sentencing gap

David Lammy had gone quiet. Sitting in his ministerial office in the Palace of Westminster, the justice secretary had just been presented with pictures of women killed by their partners in their own homes, by their grieving mothers. As she put the photographs in front of him, Carole Gould explained that her 17-year-old daughter, Ellie, was killed by fellow sixth-former Thomas Griffiths the day after she ended their relationship in 2019. Julie Devey, who was joining the call remotely, showed a photograph of her daughter, Poppy Devey Waterhouse , who was 24 when she was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, Joe Atkinson, on 14 December 2018. In both cases the young women were stabbed repeatedly; both killers tried to hide their crimes. But because they had been attacked in a domestic setting, with weapons used from their homes, their killers faced a maximum sentence of 15 years – 10 years fewer than if they had been murdered in the street or by a weapon brought to the murder scene. Atkinson’s sentence was fixed at 16 years; Griffiths got 12 and a half years. It was, the mothers said, like their daughter’s lives were worth a decade less. Carole Gould, whose daughter Ellie was killed in 2019, was watching from the public gallery as Lammy announced the plans. …