When young people are sent to prison - and invariably they are young - for a crime as serious as murder, few of us give much thought to what they will do with all that time inside. However long their sentence, it seems no more than they deserve, and often less, when the sickening details of what they have done are foremost in our minds.
So it would have been in September, 2002, when a 17-year-old was led from court with a life sentence for murder after shooting two police officers in an incident on a rural property near Palmerston North.
A 17-year minimum before he could be considered for parole would have seemed the least Daniel Luff deserved and who cared what he would do before he would be released as a man in his mid to late-30s?
Well, the widow of the policeman he killed cares. Melanie Taylor, widow of Detective Constable Duncan Taylor, says in our story today she feels no resentment. Luff was a "troubled boy" at the time, she says. "He probably didn't have time to think things through thoroughly. A lot of that is about teenaged rational behaviour and lack of thinking."
Her own son, just 11 months old when he lost his father, is now 14.
