When ideal victims don’t make ideal offenders: The (re)framing of legacy case prosecutions against elderly perpetrators of state violence

Abstract

This article undertakes a victimological critique of media coverage, social media commentary and parliamentary debate on the prosecution of former British soldier Dennis Hutchings for the death of an unarmed and vulnerable adult in Northern Ireland in 1974. It argues that a careful reframing of events and actors by the media, politicians and veterans’ movement has obfuscated perceptions of victimhood by creating a climate that favours the perpetrator rather than the victim. While this victimological reframing may reflect the natural sympathy felt towards aged and ailing defendants, it also speaks to the ability to manipulate coverage of the case so that it serves current interests: on the one hand it fits with the UK Government’s socio-political interests in how historic state violence in the North of Ireland should be ‘dealt with’, while on the other hand it also reflects longstanding cultural sensitivities that the British ‘imagined community’ has about its military veterans. This has seen Hutchings being framed less as an ‘ideal offender’ who targeted an unarmed and vulnerable person and more as an elderly victim of a politicised ‘witch hunt’ against military veterans.

Keywords

Crime and media perpetrators state violence victimology

Introduction

We gather today to remember a great man - I want to pay him a fulsome tribute. . . I want to remember and pay tribute to his service to this nation and I want to pay tribute to what he represented both in his life and in his passing.¹

Dennis was a perfect gentleman and one of the kindest men I have ever met. . . genuine, trustworthy, morally good and morally right. Dennis is and will continue to be an inspiration to us all (Military Veteran Creative Arts, 2021).

Little distinguishes these tributes to 80-year-old former British soldier Dennis Hutchings from those paid to any pensioner who died from Covid-19. The undiscerning observer would hardly surmise that the octogenarian being fondly remembered as a ‘great man’ and ‘perfect gentleman’ had, at the time of their death, been on trial in connection with the killing of an unarmed and vulnerable adult in the North of Ireland 47 years previously.

The trial of Hutchings was part of what Davidson (2020: 61) labels a global ‘silver wave’ of ageing and aged defendants appearing before international and domestic courts for historic human rights abuses. These prosecutions have, however, proven acutely contentious in Cambodia, Chile and Germany (Drumbl and Fournet, 2022). Whether in Belfast or Bosnia, the macabre reality of these prosecutions is, as the Hutchings case would prove, that the defendant might take ill or die during the proceedings (Davidović, 2021). It is true, too, that the emergence of Covid-19 heightened pre-existing sensitivities around prosecuting the ‘barely alive’ (Drumbl and Fournet, 2022:5).

Yet even before the pandemic the prosecution of Hutchings had captured the public imagination through intense media attention where the natural curiosity surrounding elderly perpetrators (Rutledge, 2005) neatly converged with the British distaste for holding ‘our boys’ accountable for overseas violence (Hearty, 2020). Much of the coverage naturally revolved around Hutchings’ advanced age, ongoing ill-health and the temporal distance from the incident, rather than on the facts of the killing or any complicity he may have had in it. Given the significant influence that the media has on societal discourses around victims and offenders (Jewkes, 2004a; Tabbert, 2016: 1; Walklate, 2012: 1), it is perhaps unsurprising that this placed Hutchings, rather than the unarmed John Pat Cunningham who had learning difficulties and a known fear of soldiers, at the victimological epicentre of the case.

The Hutchings case epitomises critical victimology’s longstanding critique of the structural factors and power relations within society that determine which harmed persons gain the label ‘victim’ and which harmed persons do not (Elias, 1986; Fattah, 2016; Hall, 2017; Mawby and Walklate, 1994; Miers, 1990: 8). As Walklate (2018: 380) notes, this entails ‘excavating’ the term ‘victim’ and problematising ‘the uses to which it has been put’. A critical victimological excavation of the term ‘victim’ in the Hutchings case would recognise how the spectre of the elderly Hutchings facing trial in terminal ill-health ‘unsettles’ the imagined division between victim and perpetrator (Spencer and Walklate, 2016: xvii). Yet it would also contextualise the ‘uses’ of the term ‘victim’ in this case against the absence of any overarching process to ‘deal with the past’ in Northern Ireland (NI). Disagreements over what the conflict was about, who is to blame for it, and what the consequences of it have been all remain bitterly contested by former protagonists, their victims and wider society 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement (GFA). Rather unhelpfully, while the GFA largely brought an end to physical fighting, it was mute on how to define and/or address the legacy of that fighting. Depending on political perspective and personal experience, one might define the 30 years of tripartite political violence between Irish republicans, Ulster loyalists and state security forces as an anti-colonial war of national liberation against British occupation, a campaign of wanton Irish republican ‘terrorism’, or as a sectarian conflict between warring factions. The lack of an overarching process to address past violence has allowed fundamental disagreement over how to define it to bleed into discussions around the concomitant issues of post-conflict truth and justice. Amidst a self-interested reluctance by the UK Government to face up to its role in the conflict, this disagreement has unhelpfully reduced the discussion around truth and justice to a politically toxic debate on whether or not former military personnel should now face criminal prosecution (Bryson et al., 2021; Mallinder, 2020; McEvoy et al., 2020).

However, the Hutchings case also speaks to the burgeoning area of cultural victimology that has built on critical victimology by examining how victimisation is presented to society and how society makes sense of it (Hall, 2017: 5). This involves critiquing how media representations shape our understanding of victimisation; what it means to be a victim, who is or is not classified as a victim, and in which particular circumstances (Mythen and McGowan, 2018: 364). A critique of ‘newsmaking victimology’ (Elias, 1994) is particularly apt in the case at hand given how the UK media have persistently invisibilised the victims of state violence in the North of Ireland (Rolston, 1991, 2007, 2020). A cultural victimological critique would acknowledge that there are socio-cultural and political factors underpinning the victimological sleight of hand that positions Hutchings, rather than Cunningham, as the victim (Hearty, 2020).

Drawing on critical and cultural victimology, this article critically examines open source material (i.e. media, social media and parliamentary coverage) on the prosecution, trial and death of Dennis Hutchings. It critiques how a victimological reframing of actions and actors in the case has inverted Christie’s (1986) ‘ideal’ typologies of the victim and offender. Although the bare facts of the case lend themselves to a neat application whereby Cunningham represents the ‘ideal victim’ and Hutchings the ‘ideal offender’, a contrived decision by politicians, the UK media and military veterans on what to deem ‘newsworthy’ in the case (Jewkes, 2004a: 40) has recast Hutchings as the victim. Cunningham, by contrast, has become a ‘non-victim’ who has not had their victimisation socially recognised (Strobl, 2004). This, it will be argued, exposes how ‘the politics of recognition’ determines which victims go seen and unseen by the media in accordance with prevailing political, social and cultural conditions (Spencer and Walklate, 2016: xi).

The article opens with a theoretical discussion of Christie’s ‘ideal’ typologies, before applying this to the facts of the Cunningham killing. It then deconstructs how the careful manipulation of what to deem ‘newsworthy’ has reframed the killing of the unarmed Cunningham as an accidental killing in the heat of battle that happened so long ago that a line needs drawn under it so society can ‘move on’ and reframed the belated prosecution of Hutchings as a politicised ‘witch hunt’ rather than a delayed criminal justice intervention. The article proceeds to outline how this has reframed Hutchings as an elderly victim and a martyr, rather than an ‘ideal offender’, at the expense of Cunningham the ‘non-victim’ of state violence.

Ideal victims and ideal offenders

Defined by Christie (1986: 18) as ‘a person or category of individuals who – when hit by crime – most readily is given the complete and legitimate status of being a ‘victim”, the ‘ideal victim’ concept has pervaded Western criminological scholarship and criminal justice policy (Duggan, 2018: 1). It is intrinsically linked to gendered, ageist and racialised notions of innocence, passivity and blamelessness (McGarry and Walklate, 2015). In order to successfully claim the ‘ideal victim’ label, Christie (1986) suggests, a victim needs to satisfy a number of preconditions: they must be weak, be undertaking a respectable project when victimised, be victimised by a big bad offender who is unknown to them and they must be able to make their case known without threatening countervailing powerful interests. However, as Duggan (2018: 1) notes, the crux of Christie’s analysis was not concerned with the literal existence of this ‘ideal’ type of victim but with critiquing society’s attachment to it as an ‘imagined’ concept (Walklate, 2006). Both critical and cultural victimology have subsequently built on Christie’s analysis through focusing on the process by which someone ‘becomes’ an ‘ideal victim’ rather than treating the concept as something that objectively exists (Hall, 2017: 15). Even if the ‘ideal victim’ is ‘imagined’, for Christie (1986) it was personified in the public imagination by an old lady who was victimised by a younger and stronger male assailant after tending to her ailing sister.

The binary opposite of the ‘ideal victim’ is the ‘ideal offender’. If the ‘ideal victim’ was an old lady then the ‘ideal offender’ was the figure of ‘a dangerous man coming from far away’ (Christie, 1986: 28), thus couching the figure in notions of masculinity (Cohen, 2018:285). The ‘ideal offender’ is an ‘inhuman human’ (Stolk, 2018: 700) and a ‘monster’ (Rock, 1998) who targets the innocent, weak and vulnerable. There is, then, a mutual dependence between how the victim and their victimiser are discursively framed and interpreted (Holstein and Miller, 1990). Defining the victim as innocent and blameless is at the same time a process of defining their victimiser as guilty, blameworthy and deserving of punishment (Ewald, 2002). According to this logic, and in theory at least, an ‘ideal victim’ naturally assumes an ‘ideal offender’. Or, as Christie (1986: 25) put it, ‘the more ideal a victim, the more ideal becomes the offender. The more ideal the offender, the more ideal is the victim’.

A cursory glance at the facts of the Cunningham killing would suggest that Cunningham and Hutchings neatly fit how the ‘ideal’ victim and offender are ‘imagined’. According to Lost Lives (McKittrick et al., 1999: 459), John Pat Cunningham was shot dead by the British Army after failing to stop when confronted by a foot patrol on 15 June 1974. He was described as ‘mentally retarded and afraid of the army’ (McKittrick et al., 1999: 459), with the inquest into his death further accepting that although he was shot dead by the British Army when running away he was not a gunman. Moreover, during Hutchings’ trial it was established that Cunningham was ‘born with an incomplete development of mind’, had the mental age of a 7-year-old, and would be classified today as a ‘vulnerable adult’ (KRW Law, 2021). It was further found that he was known to be anxious around men in uniform, having previously run away when he encountered the police, priests and the military. Cunningham was shot three times, according to the British Army at least, after ignoring warnings to halt by a military patrol he met on his way home from working at a nearby farm. An examination of Hutchings’ rifle after the killing revealed that he had discharged three bullets; a similar examination of the weapon belonging to another soldier – Soldier B – revealed that he had fired two shots. Although an internal British Army investigation at the time cleared Hutchings of wrongdoing, a police reinvestigation into the killing in 2011 would see Hutchings formally charged in 2015 (KRW Law, 2021). According to the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) the decision to prosecute Hutchings was ‘taken after an impartial and independent application of the test for prosecution’ and was based on the police reinvestigation producing ‘certain evidence not previously available’ (O’Carroll, 2021). Despite sufficient legal grounds for prosecution existing and being laid out by the PPS, extra-legal factors quickly dominated media and political discussion of the case.

The synopsis above suggests that Cunningham had what van Wijk (2013: 174) calls the ‘right attributes’ for an ‘ideal victim’; he was vulnerable, weak, and victimised by a stronger stranger when going about his everyday life. Even if some were to point to his act of running away, the fact remains that as an unarmed and vulnerable adult he was not only innocent but was on the wrong side of the asymmetry of power when confronted by a heavily armed military foot patrol. Moreover, Hutchings possessed many of the ‘right attributes’ for the ‘ideal offender’; on the fatal afternoon in Benburb he was an armed (and ultimately dangerous) stranger from hundreds of miles away, as a soldier he embodied masculinity, and firing in the direction of an unarmed vulnerable adult might be seen as a serious stain on his professional integrity.

Despite the above facts lending themselves to a seemingly natural conclusion that Cunningham was an ‘ideal victim’ of Hutchings the ‘ideal offender’, Cunningham has been unable to make his case ‘known’ due to more powerful countervailing interests. Firstly, as a victim of state violence Cunningham belongs to a category of victim that has traditionally been found at the bottom of the socio-political ‘hierarchy of victims’ in NI (Jankowitz, 2018). While the victims of non-state violence have traditionally enjoyed hyper-visibility in generally sympathetic media coverage, those victimised by state actors have been invisibilised and/or had their innocence questioned; the Bloody Sunday victims are perhaps the clearest example of this (Rolston, 2010). Secondly, prosecutions against military veterans like Hutchings inhabit a contested terrain over how to ‘deal with the past’ in NI. The wrangling over who should and should not be punished through the criminal justice system for past violence in the North of Ireland has been primarily political rather than legal. Ill-founded and misleading claims of a ‘witch hunt’ against military veterans have dominated this discussion despite the empirical and legal inaccuracy of such claims (Bryson et al., 2021; McEvoy et al., 2020). Far from correcting these erroneous claims, the UK Government discourse on legacy has been built around – as a statement outlining its latest proposals in the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy & Reconciliation) Bill states – ‘delivering on our commitments to those who served in Northern Ireland and helping society in Northern Ireland to look forward’ (Ministry of Defence, 2022). Finally, for the British ‘imagined community’ the British soldier is a cultural icon resonant of its imperial past (Dawson, 2013). The socio-political and cultural sensitivities that the British ‘imagined community’ has around its armed forces has blinded it to the litany of human rights abuses they committed overseas. In the specific context of NI, this has been underpinned by the UK media and politicians building a heroic peacekeeper image around ‘our boys’ deployed in what they portray as an irrational conflict between warring Irish factions (Hearty, 2020).

The fact that the Hutchings prosecution was a high-profile case that evidently spoke to these ‘wider societal agendas’ naturally influenced the trajectory of media reporting (Soothill et al., 2004: 1), with coverage reflecting societal attitudes towards addressing historic state violence committed by British soldiers rather than objectively examining the specifics of the case at hand (Barak, 2011: 3). Accepting that Cunningham was an unarmed and vulnerable adult unjustifiably killed by British soldiers would be anathema to the socio-political and cultural norms identified above. To avoid this uncomfortable and unpalatable reality the entire event has been reframed in a way that fails to recognise Hutchings as an ‘ideal offender’ and subsequently denies Cunningham ‘ideal victim’ status. It is the case, then, that how the victim is framed, rather than any ‘objective’ attributes that they might have, determines whether or not they will gain ‘ideal victim’ status (Duggan, 2018: 5).

Reframing actions

Rather than engaging with the substantive facts at the heart of the case (i.e. that an unarmed and vulnerable adult had been killed on their way home from work), the UK media, politicians and military veterans changed the nature of the discussion around the prosecution of Hutchings so that the killing of Cunningham became an accidental death in the heat of battle that happened so long ago that it was no longer in the public interest to investigate, and the prosecution of Hutchings became a politically motivated ‘witch hunt’ driven by ‘terrorists’ intent on ‘rewriting the past’

From unlawful killing to accidental death in battle

Politicians began reframing the Cunningham killing even before Hutchings appeared in court. Sir Henry Bellingham, for instance, told a parliamentary debate that the incident had occurred during ‘an incredibly tough, difficult year in the Province’, subsequently linking it to ‘an exchange of fire’ in Benburb when ‘firearms and bomb-making equipment had been found two days before’. Bellingham was quick to follow this up by mentioning how Hutchings ‘had been commended for his bravery and was subsequently mentioned in dispatches for the way in which he had controlled the patrol two days before’. By reframing the Cunningham killing within the extended context of what had happened in Benburb some days previous, Bellingham concluded that the death was a ‘tragic case of mistaken identity’ by a military patrol on high alert for IRA gunmen who had evaded the previous security operation (Hansard, 2018b). The media would subsequently reinforce this framing of events when an obituary to Hutchings in The Times later mentioned the previous engagement his patrol had with the IRA (The Times, 2021).

While the inference here may be that Cunningham was tragically shot in a follow-up security operation, it was left to an Irish broadsheet columnist to reiterate that ‘Cunningham. . . was no gunman. It was accepted by all sides that he was a man with learning difficulties, terrified of soldiers, who was shot three times in the back while trying to run away’ (Downing, 2021). Two victims’ campaigners writing for the independent Declassified UK news website would further challenge the Daily Mail’s ‘heat of battle’ framing of the killing by pointing out that Cunningham was killed in a rural area on a quiet afternoon where the only guns fired were those carried by Hutchings’ patrol (Cadwallader and Brecknell, 2021).

This reframing of what happened on the 15 June 1974 demonstrates how the past can be recreated so that it fits with how it is perceived today rather than how it actually happened (Mead, 1959) and how media coverage can become more consistent with the perceptions and beliefs we have about others than it is with reality (Jewkes, 2004b). Hutchings no longer represents the ‘ideal offender’ who shot at an unarmed and vulnerable man on a quiet country lane but is transformed into someone with the grave misfortune of making a fatal error in the high-octane environment of battle. This, as Cohen (2001: 11) argues, insulates Hutchings from the moral criticism of others without experience of such a charged atmosphere. Instead of reflecting fidelity to what actually happened that afternoon, the reframing of the Cunningham killing presents the events in a manner that chimes with present interests that deny Cunningham ‘ideal victim’ status.

Drawing a line under the past

The temporal distance between the killing and the prosecution has also been highlighted by supporters of Hutchings. A Commons debate was told that there was ‘clearly no public interest’ in pursuing a case against ‘a man in his late 70s who served in Northern Ireland in the 1970s’ (Hansard, 2018c), while Hutchings’ own MP Sheryll Murray decried the prosecution of ‘a kindly, elderly gentleman. . . just because he did his job more than 40 years ago’ (Hansard, 2018a). This reflects the natural tension between old age and justice where abuses were committed decades ago (Davidson, 2020), particularly when aged defendants like Hutchings live in deteriorating health without being a threat to anyone (Rutledge, 2005). Here age, as Matsiko (2022) argues, is not just interpreted as a numerical figure but also as the time that has elapsed since an offence was committed. However, while supporters of Hutchings may conceive of time as ‘irreversible’ where a past offence has become so temporally distant that it should no longer be punished today, the victims of state violence see time as ‘reversible’ because the historic wrong still resonates to demand justice (Bevernage, 2012: 2). There is, then, a ‘politicisation’ of time that echoes the dissonance between time as experienced and time as interpreted (Aboueldahab, 2021: 812); while supporters of Hutchings may interpret the Cunningham killing as a distant accident that is best ‘forgotten’ so that society can ‘move on’, for the victims of state violence time as experienced entails decades of campaigning for truth and justice in the face of state impunity that legacy case prosecutions might finally rectify (Rolston, 2020).

The ‘politicisation of time’ in the Hutchings case chimes with the ‘politicisation of time’ inherent in the UK Government’s approach to ‘dealing with the past’ more generally. Here, attempts to foreclose any further prosecutions against veterans like Hutchings have been justified, as former prime minister Boris Johnson articulated, on the apparent need to ‘draw a line under the Troubles’ (Irish Times, 2021). Recent movement away from police investigations and prosecutions via the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy & Reconciliation) Bill has been defended on the basis of ‘helping society in Northern Ireland to look forward’ (Ministry of Defence, 2022). There is, however, a vested self-interest in the state seeking to ‘turn the page’ like this (Adorno, 1998: 89), yet the traction that this argument has gained among supporters of Hutchings shows how it can be an effective ‘moral disengagement strategy’ for those unwilling to confront past wrongdoing (Li et al., 2021: 659).

The fact remains, though, that even if this helps prevent Hutchings being framed as an ‘ideal offender’, temporal distancing does not discharge the state’s legal obligation to investigate state violence (McEvoy et al., 2020) nor is it material to the guilt of the person who committed a criminal act (Rutledge, 2005). The opposition to prosecuting aged veterans like Hutchings, then, is a rejection of the legal process on what are patently non-legal grounds. Reflecting ‘the politics of recognition’, appeals for Hutchings to be given a ‘free pass’ (Barak, 2012: 374) due to old age and the temporal distance from the killing are premised on the basis of who he is rather than on what he has done.

The ‘witch hunt’

While disagreement over who should (not) be punished for past violence is common in most post-conflict sites (Dyrstad and Binningsbø, 2019), NI has seen particularly vociferous debate around legacy case prosecutions as a criminal justice means of ‘dealing with the past’ (Bryson et al., 2021; Mallinder, 2020; McEvoy et al., 2020). At its most toxic this has seen prosecutions for historic state violence dismissed by some as politically-motivated revenge waged by former ‘terrorists’ in cahoots with human rights groups and profiteering law firms (Hearty, 2020). The prosecution of Hutchings has subsequently been reframed as part of a ‘witch hunt’ rather than as the state belatedly discharging its human rights obligations to investigate state violence. One veterans’ organisation used social media to criticise the ‘vexatious prosecution’ of those like Hutchings (Rolling Thunder UK, 2021) – an analysis that resonated with Hutchings when he told the assembled media outside court that legacy prosecutions were ‘witch hunt trials against guys who were just doing a bloody job’ (Duell, 2021). A column in The Express took this analysis further upon Hutchings’ death, deriding the prosecution as ‘a McCarthyite anti-British show trial’ that was driven by an Irish republican agenda of ‘drag[ing] the British army down to the level of their own murderous terrorists and. . . feed[ing] their own movement’s narrative of victimhood by painting the British as criminal oppressors’ (McKintsry, 2021).

To support this ‘witch hunt’ narrative, opponents of legacy case prosecutions have argued that ‘soldiers who were previously investigated and cleared are being repeatedly taken to court without new evidence for political gain’ (Northern Ireland Veterans Movement, 2021a). More specifically on the Cunningham killing, they highlighted that ‘this is the fourth time that this case has been examined by the law’ (Northern Ireland Veterans Movement, 2021b), while parliament was told that Hutchings had been ‘rearrested for an allegation for which he has previously been cleared of any wrongdoing on two separate occasions’ (Hansard, 2018c).

However, this narrative can only frame Hutchings as a victim of politically-motivated repeat investigation because it has conveniently and wilfully overlooked certain facts. Firstly, while it is true that many state killings were previously investigated, it has since been established that the original investigations were flawed and fell short of modern Article 2 European Convention on Human Rights standards on independence and effectiveness (McEvoy et al., 2020). Secondly, while Hutchings may well have been previously investigated over the Cunningham killing, on each of these occasions – from initially being questioned 3 days after the shooting to a legacy case police interview in 2015 – he consistently answered ‘no comment’ (Cadwallader and Brecknell, 2021). Rather than proving himself to be innocent during these earlier investigations, it appears that Hutchings failed to meaningfully engage with an investigative process that could have definitively exonerated him of any wrongdoing. When placed within this context, the prosecution of Hutchings seems more like a belated corrective to original inadequacies in previous investigations than it does the politicised hounding of veterans by former ‘terrorists’ and their legal fellow travellers. However, deciding that that this wider backdrop to the case is not ‘newsworthy’ allows the Hutchings’ prosecution to be divorced from its proper context and framed as something other than a belated criminal justice intervention.

Reframing actors

The reframing of actions has consequentially led to the actors involved being reframed too. The temporal distancing of the killing from the trial has helped to frame Hutchings as an elderly, terminally-ill victim, while the ‘witch hunt’ narrative has framed him as a martyr in the fight against the ‘rewriting of the past’. At the same time, though, John Pat Cunningham has been rendered invisible in the discussion around the case; this cumulative failure to establish a victim identity and to have it socially recognised positions him as a ‘non-victim’ (Strobl, 2004) in contrast to Hutchings who has established a socially recognised victim identity. These discursive creations, though, have ‘counterparts in reality’ (Tabbert, 2016: 2) that defy the simplistic social reality that the media built around the case (Barak, 2012: 375).

The elderly victim

Unsurprisingly coverage of the Hutchings case revolved around his advanced age and failing health. Even if these are immaterial from a strictly legal and/or retributist perspective (Brown, 1998), they are nonetheless of huge aesthetic relevance (Davidson, 2020). The optics of elderly defendants standing trial skews the discussion towards the defendant as they appear today – elderly, weak and in ill-health – as opposed to how they were at the time of their offence (Porcella, 2007). Advanced age and ill-health are attributes often associated with the ‘ideal victim’ (Christie, 1986: 19), hence our natural tendency to look upon the elderly as ‘ideal victims’ instead of ‘ideal offenders’ (Fattah and Sacco, 1989). On the one hand, there is the critical victimological ‘unsettling’ of the imagined distinction between victim and perpetrator, while on the other hand social and cultural influences encourage us to ‘see’ the elderly and infirm as victims rather than victimisers.

The framing of Hutchings as elderly and sick was discernible in the final media interview he gave prior to his trial, where the introduction read ‘Dennis Hutchings walks 20 yards out of the café on the Plymouth sea front and stops abruptly, unable to breathe. He gulps for air, his body in contortions’ (Mendick, 2021a). An account in The Times informed how ‘he has waited six long years to have his day in court. He struggles to breathe and is receiving dialysis for kidney failure. His doctor told him he was not well enough to travel’ (Brown, 2021), while another in The Mail decried ‘the spectacle of a dying veteran sitting in a dock in Belfast wearing his service medals’ (Feehan, 2021). Aged defendants are aware of their ability to leverage sympathy and often play into the optics of this (Drumbl and Fournet, 2022), with Hutchings telling assembled reporters ‘I am in palliative care at the moment’ as he entered court during an earlier hearing related to the case (Ward, 2019). Certainly, when one ‘imagines’ Hutchings as described here the concept of the ‘ideal victim’ seems a neater fit than does the ‘ideal offender’.

The onset of Covid-19 saw public health and public accountability collide in the prosecution of elderly defendants (Drumbl and Fournet, 2022: 20), and, perhaps unsurprisingly, when Hutchings contracted, and then eventually succumbed to Covid-19, his trial was reframed as a health risk. Drawing a direct causal line between the trial and Hutchings contracting Covid-19, Conservative MP Johnny Mercer argued that ‘clearly he would not have caught Covid if he wasn’t there. If he had not attended this trial, he would be alive. The trial killed him’ (Ingham, 2021). A social media post from the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement similarly concluded that ‘people will claim that it was illness that took him but it was this trial that took him. . . at the age of 80 during a pandemic he had to fly packed in an aircraft, he had to live in a hotel and sit in a packed court’ (Northern Ireland Veterans Movement, 2021c). Here, again, the emphasis on Hutchings as an aged and infirm person put at risk of contracting Covid-19 at trial wilfully overlooks the fact that Hutchings was on trial for very serious criminal offences committed decades ago when he was an abled-bodied young man. At the same time, though, it does reflect that as a terminally-ill elderly person Hutchings had a heightened vulnerability to Covid-19 – a fact that further ‘unsettles’ the distinction between Hutchings as a victim of the criminal justice system’s cruel indifference during a global health emergency and Hutchings as the ‘ideal offender’ being held accountable for past misdeeds.

The above reframing of Hutchings as an elderly victim of Covid-19, rather than as an ‘ideal offender’, demonstrates how ‘ideal’ typologies are not constructed from the material qualities of a criminal act but from the innate characteristics assigned to the actors involved (Cohen, 2018: 281). These are often the product of ideas and assumptions arising from the careful manipulation of how actors and events are portrayed rather than reflecting lived reality (Tabbert, 2016: 2). Hutchings as a terminally ill octogenarian in the ‘here and now’ becomes the focus of the narrative rather than Hutchings as the abled-bodied soldier in the ‘there and then’ (Hearty, 2020: 229). This further ‘unsettles’ the binary distinction between victim and perpetrator in the public imagination and favourably couches Hutchings with a weakness and vulnerability more conducive to the ‘ideal victim’ than to the ‘ideal offender’. The fact that Hutchings was on trial for the death of an unarmed and vulnerable person therefore becomes obscured in the narrative surrounding his prosecution as a medically vulnerable pensioner during a global pandemic.

The martyr

Supporters of Hutchings have argued that the cruellest aspect of his death before a verdict could be returned was that it denied him the opportunity of being exonerated in the courts. One veterans’ organisation even argued that ‘Dennis could have pulled out of the case on the grounds of ill-health but he was determined to have his day in court and hear the words ‘Not Guilty’. Sadly in spite of his immense courage, that day never came’ (Northern Ireland Veterans Movement, 2021c). While Hutchings recognised that an acquittal would ultimately be ‘too late for me’, he nonetheless maintained that through fighting his case he could force ‘the government to do the right thing for all those veterans who served to maintain peace in Northern Ireland and who continue to live in fear of a knock on the door’ (News Letter, 2021). By this logic, Hutchings was not only fighting to clear his own name over the Cunningham killing but to also bring an end to the legacy case ‘witch hunt’ against the veteran constituency.

Following his death, Hutchings’ lawyer would reframe him in this martyrological way:

Dennis was. . . adamant he was innocent and he was adamant he would fight the case, so others would not have to go through what he went through. He could have avoided the trial because he was so ill, but at no point did he ever do that. He said: ‘I will go through this so others don’t have to’. That is what he was all about. He was a soldier to the end looking after his men. . . we would often say this was his last mission (Mendick, 2021b).

Even if Hutchings is reframed as an elderly and sickly victim, he is also reframed as a heroic figure; loyal, courageous and committed to his fellow soldiers. This martyrological framing of Hutchings as a committed and dedicated soldier was reinforced when a decision was taken to delay his burial until Armistice Day, the traditional day of commemoration for members of the British armed forces who died in service. This was, according to Johnny Mercer MP who spoke at his funeral, a fitting tribute to ‘the quintessential British non-commissioned officer’ (Mendick, 2021b). This framing continues today, with his lawyer suggesting that any prospective legislation that prevents the future prosecution of military veterans for historic offences ‘should be known as Dennis’ Law as it is the cause that he fought and died for’ (Ingham, 2021). Moreover, Hutchings’ partner recently declared that she would ‘continue Dennis’ fight on behalf of British Army veterans’ by persisting with a legal claim he had initiated against the UK Government at the European Court of Human Rights for alleged discrimination against military veterans in the NI legacy process (McCurry, 2022).

This dualistic reframing as a hero and a victim certainly resonates with the emerging ‘hero-victim’ identity of military veterans in the British public consciousness (Hearty, 2020: 228). While soldiers, as white heteronormative males, have traditionally been seen as the victimological ‘other’ (Walklate, 2006), increased media coverage of the lived reality of service in Afghanistan and Iraq had the socio-cultural side effect of encouraging the public to see British soldiers in a more victimologically nuanced way (Walklate et al., 2011). When the wider socio-cultural environment changes like this, then, binary understandings of victimhood are further ‘unsettled’ as heroic figures like soldiers undergo the process of ‘becoming’ a victim in the eyes of society (Hall, 2017: 14).

Yet even if the reframing of Hutchings as ‘hero-victim’ reflects this changed socio-cultural environment, it is nevertheless incongruous with the facts established during the trial itself. Despite assertions that the trial would eventually prove his innocence, the evidence disclosed in proceedings prior to Hutchings’ death revealed that Cunningham was shot three times and that the other soldier on patrol with Hutchings had only fired two shots. This led victims’ campaigners to argue that ‘either some of his shots hit John Pat, or if he missed completely then his silence helped cover up for his junior colleague. Neither scenario is particularly heroic’ (Cadwallader and Brecknell, 2021). This was, of course, a minority voice of dissent amidst a deluge of more favourable mainstream media coverage that reflected the critical victimological ‘unsettling’ of imagined binaries whereby Hutchings personified the British military ‘hero-victim’.

The non-victim

For all that extensive coverage of the trial concentrated on reframing Hutchings as an elderly victim and martyr, there was a remarkable invisibilisation of Cunningham. Whenever a victim possesses the right victimological attributes for ‘ideal’ victimhood they usually dominate the public discussion of their case (Cohen, 2018: 281), yet the oddity of the Hutchings trial is that it focused almost exclusively on the elderly perpetrator rather than the vulnerable victim. The clamour to reframe Hutchings as something other than the ‘ideal offender’ effectively reduced Cunningham to being less than a victimological afterthought, with one member of the Cunningham family arguing that ‘John Pat is the only victim in this. . . and he’s the one people are talking about least’ (McClements, 2021). Far from being the ‘ideal victim’ whose case is widely known, Cunningham has thus been transformed into a ‘non-victim’ who has failed to have their story heard (Strobl, 2004). Granted, coverage of the Hutchings trial did not contest the victimhood of Cunningham per se; it simply refused to acknowledge it by choosing to make the plight of the elderly and terminally ill Hutchings being brought to trial ‘newsworthy’. Cunningham, it seems, was irrelevant in the entire matter despite the fact that his killing was the reason that Hutchings was being brought to trial in the first place. It is the case that, as Mythen and McGowan (2018: 372) note, even if the media cannot tell people what to think they can still significantly influence what people think about. Or, as seems more relevant in the case at hand, who they think about (i.e. Hutchings and not Cunningham).

Perhaps the most glaring illustration of how Cunningham had become the ‘non-victim’ lies in remarks made by then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson during a visit to Armagh in 2021. Despite being less than 10 miles from the scene where Cunningham was shot dead, when asked about the Hutchings case Johnson responded that he felt ‘very, very sad’ for Hutchings and ‘for all his family’. Astonishingly, Johnson failed to once mention Cunningham or his family during the same interview (Cadwallader and Brecknell, 2021). Johnson’s wilful failure to acknowledge Cunningham typifies how Hutchings has been ‘misrecognised’ as the victim in the whole affair; the narrative is now about Hutchings as victim rather than Cunningham as victim (Hearty, 2020: 230). According to the Cunningham family ‘it is the status of the victim that has framed the reaction not the detail of the case’. For them, the concerted effort to deny ‘ideal victim’ status by ‘sections of the British press has been determined by the fact that John Pat Cunningham, who posed no threat whatsoever, was an Irish catholic’ (KRW Law, 2021).

This speaks, again, to how victimhood and perpetratorship are presented by the media and interpreted by the target audience. The greatest impediment to Cunningham making his case ‘known’ as an ‘ideal victim’ is the fact that recognition of victimhood relies on the relationship between the victim, their victimiser and the target audience that can confer victimhood status (Jacoby, 2015). In the UK there is a general readiness to more favourably identify with military veterans than with any prospective overseas ‘other’ (McGarry and Ferguson, 2012), meaning that socio-political and cultural mores are more conducive to giving Hutchings a ‘free pass’ than they are to acknowledging Cunningham as an ‘ideal victim’. If, as Hall (2017: 18) suggests, attaining victim status requires a certain degree of social capital, then Cunningham is disadvantaged in a socio-cultural climate where Hutchings enjoys the requisite geographical, socio-cultural and temporal proximity to the target audience that recognition of victimhood depends upon (Mythen and McGowan, 2018: 369). Had John Pat Cunningham been an unarmed and vulnerable adult shot dead by the British Army in Birmingham, rather than in Benburb, a more even victimological playing field may well have helped him ‘become’ the ‘ideal victim’. Without this, though, he has been rendered a ‘non-victim’ through failing to have his victimhood socially recognised by a target audience more sympathetic to Hutchings as a terminally-ill and elderly veteran.

It highlights, too, how media coverage is not objective, but is rooted in prevailing political interests (Barak, 2012: 375). Recognising the ‘ideal’ victimhood of Cunningham would raise further discomfiting questions about state violence that those supportive of Hutchings would much rather avoid. The most obvious solution to this quandary, then, is to ‘misrecognise’ Hutchings as the victim in a discursive process that ultimately removes Cunningham from the victimological equation. The cumulative impact of this is that while Hutchings has been reframed from being the ‘ideal offender’ to now being an elderly victim and martyr, the vulnerable and blameless Cunningham has been further victimised through becoming a ‘victim of indifference’ (van Wijk, 2013: 167) through the UK media’s wilful blindness to his victimisation.

Conclusion

Writing on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt (1963: 8) argued that high-profile trials ultimately focus on the perpetrator rather than on their victims. Arendt’s point is reflected in the extensive coverage of the prosecution of Dennis Hutchings in relation to the death of John Pat Cunningham. While the visibility of Hutchings as an elderly and sick defendant and the concomitant invisibility of Cunningham as an ‘ideal victim’ reflect the differential focus on certain victims and offenders that criminology and victimology have long grappled with (Cohen, 2018: 281), they speak too to the social, cultural and political factors that determine what is ‘newsworthy’ (Jewkes, 2004a). Underpinned by ‘the politics of recognition’, a more sympathetic framing of Hutchings as an elderly and terminally-ill target of a politically-motivated ‘witch hunt’ has ‘unsettled’ the victim-perpetrator binary and enabled Hutchings to ‘become’ the victim in the public imagination. The invisibility of Cunningham in the discussion around the prosecution of Hutchings substantiates Christie’s (1986) point that having the ‘right attributes’ of being weak, vulnerable and victimised by a stronger stranger are not sufficient when a victim cannot make their case ‘known’ in the face of countervailing norms that favour the offender over their victim.

Critical examination of coverage of the Hutchings prosecution suggests that it is Hutchings, rather than Cunningham, who has been able to make his case ‘known’. Reframing the discussion to focus on Hutchings as an aged and ailing defendant in the ‘here and now’ as opposed to an abled-bodied perpetrator in the ‘there and then’ ‘unsettles’ the victim-perpetrator dichotomy and encourages a more sympathetic approach towards him. Far from personifying the ‘monster perpetrator’ who preys on the ‘innocent target’ (Rock, 1998), Hutchings has been reframed as the ‘hero-victim’; elderly, frail yet steadfastly committed to opposing the politicised ‘witch hunt’ against former military veterans. This ‘misrecognition’ of Hutchings, rather than the vulnerable and unarmed Cunningham, as the victim corresponds with countervailing socio-political and cultural interests that have defined the UK Government’s approach to ‘dealing with the past’ in NI (Mallinder, 2020; McEvoy et al., 2020; Rolston, 2020), increasingly recognised the vulnerability of veterans (Walklate et al., 2011), and typified the British ‘imagined community’s’ lack of critical self-reflection when confronting human rights abuses committed by ‘our boys’ (Hearty, 2020). The narrative thus becomes about Hutchings – and not Cunningham – because these countervailing interests can be better served by telling the story of the elderly and terminally ill Hutchings than they can be by critically reflecting on the longstanding impunity for the killing of a vulnerable and unarmed adult by the British Army. The plight of the terminally ill Hutchings becomes a ‘signal’ case (Innes, 2004) that transforms the prosecution of former British soldiers into a pressing contemporary social problem (Chancer, 2005) rather than a criminal justice matter. Evidently, then, it takes more than having the ‘right attributes’ to be acknowledged by the UK media as the ‘ideal victim’ in the North of Ireland.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kevin Hearty

Notes

Author biography

Kevin Hearty is a Lecturer in Criminology based in the School of Social Sciences, Education & Social Work (SSESW) at Queen’s University Belfast. Kevin has published widely on state violence, contested victimhood and the `dealing with the past’ process in the North of Ireland. His wider research interests include victimology, transitional justice and critical criminology.

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