Court finds 'no merit' whatsoever in William Hutchinson's call for sentence to be lowered after being convicted of beating Alice Morrow to death

In a judgement issued today, the court threw out his challenge to his 21 year minimum tariff for killing his long-term girlfriend Alice Morrow in 2019.

Hutchinson had a history of beating her up, and shortly after attacking her on Sunday, March 10, 2019 (and prior to calling an ambulance), he had a phone conversation with someone, during which he said: “I never hit her this bad before, I haven’t hit her in two years, I f***ed up this time, this is the worst I’ve hit her”.​

He was convicted of murder in June 2021.

He appealed against his sentence, claiming that the judge (Judge Jeffrey Miller KC) had “double-counted certain factors” in coming up with the sentence, that he had “failed to take into account certain factors in mitigation,” and had “made insufficient allowance for the guilty plea”.

In its ruling on Monday, the court said there was “no merit in any of the grounds of appeal”.

It determined that “the judge’s sentence was neither wrong in principle, nor manifestly excessive".

Instead it “reflected the serious nature of the offence characterised, as it was, by significant violence against a vulnerable woman in a domestic setting by a man with a prolonged history of significant violence against the deceased and other female partners”.

It added that “in response to the applicant’s criticism of the judge’s reduction of the tariff for his late guilty plea, which amounted to one-eighth, the court by contrast considered that the reduction had been generous”.

This was because “the applicant had shown no remorse or empathy and his late plea offered little comfort or vindication to the deceased’s family in addition to which he had maintained his innocence despite his guilty plea”.

Hutchinson was aged 45, with an address at Kilbroney House, east Belfast, at the time of his sentencing.

Alice Morrow had been 53, and was found dead in the Braniel Estate, south-east Belfast.

She was discovered “naked and lifeless with multiple injuries” by police, and a post-mortem found “death had resulted from a sustained blunt force assault”, with evidence of attempted strangulation.

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