Justice, Order, and Outrage
The Epping Sentences, Public Trust, and the Moral Failure of Modern Law
In late September 2025, public anger ignited over the sentencing of three men — Stuart Williams, Martin Peagram, and Dean Smith — who had taken part in the protests outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex. Each had joined demonstrations after it emerged that one of the hotel’s residents, Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, an asylum seeker, had sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and another woman in the town.¹
Kebatu was sentenced to twelve months in prison for five counts of sexual assault.² The protesters, meanwhile, received between one year ten months and two years four months for violent disorder and assaulting police officers.³ The contrast sparked widespread outrage. How could those angered by a sexual crime be punished more harshly than the man who committed it?
The question resonated far beyond Essex. Many saw it as a sign of what they called a “two-tier justice system” — a Britain where crimes of outrage receive heavier censure than crimes of depravity, and where protecting the state’s dignity matters more than protecting its daughters.
The Law’s Defence
Barrister Aidan Ellis, speaking on his Black Belt Barrister channel, has offered a detailed legal analysis. He notes that while the disparity appears shocking, it arises not from bias but from the sentencing guidelines themselves. Violent disorder is treated with exceptional gravity because it threatens civil peace; sexual assault, by contrast, encompasses a wide spectrum — from serious violation to what the law classifies as “lower-end contact.”⁴
Ellis quotes the sentencing remarks of Judge Timothy Walker, who described how the protest “went beyond attendance and became criminal” once it turned violent.⁵ Officers were pelted with bottles and stones; property was damaged; and some protesters, the judge said, were “motivated at least in part by hostility toward members of a racial group.”⁶ In his view, deterrence demanded exemplary punishment.
This, Ellis argues, is the crucial point: the judge applied the law correctly. The protesters’ violence met the statutory threshold for custodial sentences; Kebatu’s crimes, though revolting, were treated within the lower range permitted for his offence category. “If you think the sentence is too lenient,” Ellis concluded, “the problem lies with the guidelines, not the judge.”⁷
The Deeper Crisis: When Law Ceases to Reflect Justice
Yet Nuntiatoria contends that legality and morality are not the same thing. The court may have acted within its mandate, but the disparity still exposes a deeper disorder — a law increasingly detached from the moral order it once mirrored.
When a nation punishes outrage more severely than sin, it has inverted the hierarchy of justice. Sexual assault against a child is an attack on innocence and on the common good itself; violent protest, while dangerous, is a symptom of that moral injury. A just society cannot excuse the latter — but neither can it tolerate the impression that it empathises more with order than with innocence.
The philosopher St Thomas Aquinas taught that “an unjust law is no law at all.”⁸ Catholic teaching insists that authority draws its legitimacy not from itself, but from its orientation toward the moral order.⁹ When a legal system values procedural consistency above moral proportionality, it ceases to be an instrument of justice and becomes an idol of control.
The Two-Tier Illusion
The Epping case has thus become emblematic of a wider cultural fracture. To the judiciary, the difference in sentences makes sense — the offences fall under distinct legal categories. To ordinary citizens, however, it offends the natural law written on the heart: that the corruption of the innocent is more grievous than the anger of the indignant.
This is why legal reasoning alone cannot heal public trust. The law may be impartial in form yet still unjust in substance if it fails to mirror truth. The state’s overzealous defence of public order at the expense of moral proportion betrays its insecurity. A government that imprisons citizens for outrage but releases predators with haste risks being seen as righteous in process, corrupt in purpose.
A Call for Moral Restoration
Ellis is right that violent disorder must not be tolerated; no protest, however justified, can descend into riot. But the deeper scandal is that the public intuitively recognises injustice even when the law does not. Until Britain’s sentencing framework restores the proper moral hierarchy — until it esteems the protection of the innocent above the preservation of order — faith in the courts will continue to erode.
A society that punishes anger more severely than evil will end by breeding both. Law must again become the servant of justice, not its substitute.
Footnotes
¹ AP News, “British judge sentences an asylum-seeker to 12 months in a case that triggered anti-migrant protests,” 23 Sept 2025.
² The Guardian, “Asylum seeker at centre of Essex hotel protests jailed for 12 months,” 23 Sept 2025.
³ BBC News, “Three men jailed for violent disorder outside hotel housing asylum seekers,” 24 Sept 2025.
⁴ Aidan Ellis, “The Epping Hotel Protest Sentences Explained,” Black Belt Barrister (YouTube), Oct 2025.
⁵ Sentencing remarks of Judge Timothy Walker, Chelmsford Crown Court, July 2025.
⁶ BBC News, ibid.
⁷ Ellis, Black Belt Barrister, Oct 2025.
⁸ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q.96, a.4.
⁹ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1902.
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