When Justice Fails: Southport Killer Avoids Maximum Sentence in Savage Stabbing Deaths
“The Southport monster didn’t just kill three little white girls. He stabbed them hundreds of times, and he stabbed almost a dozen other girls almost as many times.”

There is no death penalty in the United Kingdom. The maximum sentence reserved for even the most heinous of crimes is a “whole-life order,” in which the perpetrator has no chance of release. There is, however, a caveat. The offender must be at least 18-years-old at the time the offense occurred.
At the time that Axel Rudakubana entered a Southport, England, dance class last July, where girls aged five to ten had gathered to dance to Taylor Swift music and make friendship bracelets, and brutally stabbed three young girls to death and wounded 10 others, he was 9 days short of that milestone. Thus, he was sentenced in the Liverpool Crown Court on Thursday to a minimum of 52 years in prison. This monster will be eligible for release at the age of 70.
Still a stiff penalty some might say? Not if one considers the gravity of the offense.
The Spectator’s David Shipley recounted the details of the horrific crime scene:
He moved quickly through the room, killing innocent, defenceless children.
Rudakubana killed three girls and stabbed another ten people. Alice, one of his victims, was nine. She was taken to hospital, but her injuries were so severe she died the following morning.
…
Bebe, another victim, was six. She was found on the landing outside the studio door. She had ‘defensive injuries’ and had suffered at least 122 sharp force injuries. Elsie, the final girl killed by Rudakubana, was seven. Her 85 sharp force injuries were so severe that she could not have been saved. Their injuries were described in court as ‘sadistic’. One girl who survived had 32 stab wounds. While under arrest at the police station, Rudakubana said: ‘It’s a good thing those children are dead…I’m so glad…so happy’ and: ‘Literally, such a good thing those kids are dead, six years old… So happy, six years old. It’s a good thing they are dead, yeah’.
The Southport monster didn’t just kill three little white girls. He stabbed them hundreds of times, and he stabbed almost a dozen other girls almost as many times, even dragging the wounded back into the center as they were fleeing so he could cut them up them even more. Later he… pic.twitter.com/qRCIAPVtDH
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) January 24, 2025
Rudakubana is not an illegal migrant. According to The Washington Post, he was born in Cardiff, Wales, to parents who had immigrated to England from Rwanda. He “has attended British schools his whole life.”
Investigators told The New York Times that Rudakubana “was obsessed by violence and genocide.” The Times reported that prior to the murders:
The teenager had become increasingly withdrawn, even from his family. He rarely left his home, a red brick house on a quiet cul-de-sac in the village of Banks, near the west coast of England.
Alone with his thoughts, he scrolled endlessly through online images and descriptions of war, torture and death, feeding an obsession with genocide and killing.
Rudakubana’s grisly attack did not come out of the blue. The Times described him as a “deeply troubled individual whose fascination with violence was brought to the authorities’ attention when he was just 13, and who had been known to a number of state agencies for years.”
He had been referred three times to Prevent, a counterterrorism program, when he was 13 and 14 because of his fixation on violence, the government confirmed on Monday. He had also come into contact with the police, the courts, social services and mental health services in the years before the attack.
During a search of his home, police found ricin, a lethal toxin, “as well as a PDF file titled ‘Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual.'”
Oddly, a spokeswoman for the Merseyside Police explained that the case was not treated as terrorism because “his online history showed a wide interest in conflict, terrorism and genocide, and there was no evidence that he subscribed to a single political or religious ideology. … No one ideology was uncovered.”
The Independent reported that Rudakubana’s parents contacted the police on four occasions in 2021 and 2022 for help with their son. Officers from Lancashire Constabulary went to the home, “but each time failed to identify the threat he posed.”
The last call came in May 2022. According to the Independent, Rudakubana’s father told police that his son’s behavior “had escalated because they denied him access to a computer.”
The previous call to the police was made two months earlier. His mother called to report her son missing. The police tracked Rudakubana down on a bus. He was carrying a knife. Officers brought him back to the family home, “where they gave the mother advice on securing knives in the home.”
Numerous red flags emerged leading up to this brutal massacre, yet they went either unnoticed or unheeded, as they so often do.
It’s no wonder Britons don’t feel safe. A YouGov poll released this week found that 61% of respondents do not feel confident about the state’s ability to “reduce the risk” of another attack like Southport.
Axel Rudakubana's dad stops him catching cab to school where he planned massacrehttps://t.co/TdjxgpCHCx pic.twitter.com/NFkO3evR8O
— Daily Star (@dailystar) January 23, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.

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Comments
52 years not long enough? In Germany, this guy would be out in 15 years max because that’s the limit for a 17-year-old! You call 52 years injustice? Try looking at how other countries handle these cases. 😡
IMO this guy should be executed then buried in the prison cemetery so he never leaves prison grounds. Of.course that’s from not just a USA perspective but a rural Alabama County perspective.
“Still a stiff penalty some might say? Not if one considers the gravity of the offense.”
I’m sure he will have a lot of fellow prisoners — actual British natives — concerned about the gravity of his offense. If he makes it to age 70 — make that 25 — I’ll be amazed.
He is an actual British native.
Justice would be giving the father’s of those three girls 10 minutes alone in a room with that bastard and no cameras on.
10 minutes ain’t long enough. Try a month with hammers, knives, a blowtorch to cauterize, antibiotics, saline and blood transfusion to keep the guy alive for the whole month of ‘festivities’ as he is reduced inch by inch to a torso wracked by unimaginable agony and driven completely mad.
Dads in England should be stocking up on caustic soda.
Of course not. The abject failure of prevention, and subsequent cover up and arrest of people demonstrating against this violence, wouldn’t allow a maximum sentence. That would go even further in acknowledging how sick and twisted the UK has become.
Keir Starmer wants to make this about “young men in their bedrooms.” The simple fact of the matter is that you have a system terrified of enacting just punishments because it fears being seen as racist. It’s the same toxic ideology that causes George Floyd’s family, that utterly failed to provide the man with any support while he was alive, to become recipients of a multi million dollar payout in tax payer dollars.
They are OBSESSED with africa.
He did get the maximum sentence available. Life in prison, with a remote possibility of parole when he’s 70. And the judge said that had he been 18 he would have imposed life without parole, even though that’s normally reserved for those over 21. But at 17 it simply wasn’t an option.
So your claim that the UK system is “terrified of enacting just punishments because it fears being seen as racist” is just outright false. He got the maximum he could get, and had he been white he could not have got anything more.
If you have a problem with the law requiring offenders under 18 to be given a possibility of parole, you can discuss that; but you can’t claim it was enacted out of fear of racism, because it applies equally to everyone.
Norwegian youth-camp killer, Anders Breivik, slaughtered. 77 people as an adult. He received the maximum sentence of 21 years, and successfully sued the prison authority to obtain fluffier pillows.
The kids got eternal sentences. After the first murder, the rest were freebies.
Holy moly. This is insane as it is outrageous…but also predictable if you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening in the UK. I knew the death throes of the declining empire were upon us when they gave the Lockerbie bomber – al-Megrahi – compassionate release because he only had 3-months to live. That was in 2009. al-Megrahi didn’t die until 2012, 2-years and 9-mos after his release. I wonder when and why they will release this loser.
Because the most recent killer in the UK used a knife, they are now seriously considering requiring 2 ID’s to buy a knife–has no one in the UK ever watched a prison film where the inmates turn just about anything into a weapon? Will they now ban pens and pencils, or will they require a license to buy them? I honestly thought that the Labour Party couldn’t get worse, but here we are.
There have been numerous demonstrations of the form that a working fully automatic rifle can be constructed out of a junk Volvo by a mechanic with a hobby machine shop within eight hours.
A knife requires only a discarded shovel, a scrap hose, and a $14 Harbor Freight angle grinder.
Just about anyone can make a knife from a piece of iron or steel.
Or a toothbrush.
London has fallen
Churchill is rolling in his grave
Where are the SAS
Muslim men in England are overdoing it. It is nonstop violence against little White girls and Muslim religious leaders are, if anything, encouraging this evil behavior. They’re going to have a race war over there.
Part of Islam allows Muslim men to take possession of non Muslim women. This includes rape and slavery.
English men have become very effeminate
The days of English gangs, not so much anymore
The government is owned by the Muslims and fear
What the hell has this got to do with Moslems? The guy is not Moslem, has nothing to do with Islam, and falsely blaming Islam is what caused the Southport riot.
The only sane punishment for this evil person is death.
I seen the girls pictures before but glad they are up top .
Heartbreaking
It will be interesting to see how long he lasts in prison.
Let’s hope his prison mates “terminate…with extreme prejudice”.
The UK has surrendered to Islam. The big scandal for decades has been Pakistani rape gangs, mislabeled as “grooming gangs,” and the government’s failure to stop the rape and torture of innocent British young girls. The book “Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal” by Peter McLoughlin was published about ten years ago. We can get a copy from many American booksellers such as Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Powell’s etc. Guess which major bookseller doesn’t carry this title? Amazon! I have checked this myself. Credit to John Derbyshire for pointing this out. Yes it appears that Amazon is censoring this book. Perhaps there is an innocent explanation. Some sites offer excepts. I won’t repeat the excerpts because they are too ghastly. What these Pakistani gangs do to young British girls goes way beyond rape. Yet the British government won’t act. If I were president of the US, I would tell the British government to act, or we will pull our ambassador and embargo Britain. We acted against South Africa even though blacks poured into SA.
I am horrified and sickened. I won’t set foot in the UK. The police won’t act except against the parents who complain about what happened to their daughters. In my opinion, men have an inherent obligation to protect their families. British men: what’s wrong with you?
The U.K.’s tragic and self-imposed societal emasculation was emphatically underscored to me when I first learned that most of their police officers don’t carry pistols.
Whenever a Muslim terrorist is shooting, stabbing or driving over innocents, these useless Keystone Kops must call in a special unit to neutralize the perp, while more innocents die, due to the farcical delay.
The U.K. is doomed, unless it reverses course with respect to its posture of manifest stupidity and naivete in matters of security, energy and Muslim immigration.
He doesn’t look like a Welshman.
Oh, really? What does a Welshman look like?
He was born in Wales. That makes him a Welshman.
Do you also think Clarence Thomas doesn’t look like an American?
IDK man if he’s Welsh then shouldn’t he have an ‘ap’ in his name or among him, his Father, Brothers or Uncles have at least one named Llewellyn? 😋
And he should also be able to carry a tune. For all you or I know he can, and there’s a Llewellyn, a Lloyd, or a Dafydd somewhere in the family.
But seriously, lacking any of that he’s still Welsh. Denying it would require also denying that Robert Briscoe was Irish.
It’s not odd at all. The definition of “terrorism” is violence or threats thereof, to achieve a political goal. I just consulted four separate dictionaries and they all had variants of this definition. Violence with no goal in mind, violence that is not meant to achieve something, is not terrorism.
Therefore this deathseeker is not a terrorist, and could probably not have been helped by a program that’s designed to try to deradicalize young would-be terrorists. You can’t deradicalize someone who isn’t radicalized in the first place. A radical believes intensely in something; this person seems to believe in nothing at all, and to be obsessed with death simply for its own sake. He didn’t kill for a god or for an ideology, he killed just for the joy of killing. He might have done well as a viking or a Hun or something like that.
This term of native seems to me to have gotten whitewashed to now include being born in a country but not of citizens there of. In my understanding a couple hundred years ago that person wouldn’t be concerned a subject of England.
President Trump signed that EO ending birth right and stopped by a judge, no surprise there. But I don’t have a good feeling the Supreme Court will uphold President Trump ruling.
That is exactly what “native” means. There is no other definition.
Your understanding is wrong.
British Gov’t has for centuries held that anyone born in Britain is a subject of the Crown. This was part of the problems leading to the War of 1812. The Brits would stop and board US shipping and take US sailors off and ‘press’ (kidnap/Shanghai) them into the British Navy.
Their view was once someone was a subject that lasted until death. Since there wasn’t much to differentiate between US sailors from actual British sailors other than a sworn affidavit and the reality that many were in fact British under British law the British Navy got away with it for decades.
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