Evil triple shotgun murderer Nicholas Prosper has been spared a whole life sentence for a second time after senior judges agreed his 49-year term was not ‘unduly lenient’.
The 19-year-old spent a year plotting Britain’s worst mass murder at his old school in September 2023.
He had bought the firearm, along with 100 cartridges, a day earlier with the aim of killing 34 people, outdoing US school killings at Sandy Hook in 2012 and Virginia Tech in 2007.
Those plans were only thwarted when his mum, Juliana Falcon, 48, woke early and discovered he had the shotgun.
Prosper blasted her in the head at close range, placing a copy of the novel ‘How to Kill Your Family’ on her legs’, before killing 13-year-old sister Giselle Prosper as she cowered under a table.
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He then shot his brother Kyle Prosper, 16, whom he also stabbed 100 times.
The teen had bloody hands and was still dressed in his yellow and black killing outfit when he was arrested at 7.50am on September 13, still too early to target the school.
Sentencing Prosper at Luton Crown Court in March, High Court judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said: ‘You hadn’t hated your mother or siblings and had had a good life with them.
‘Your intention had been to kill them in their sleep and rape your sister.
‘You had intended to leave the flat at around 8.30am, arrive at St Joseph’s school at 9am, go into a class and pretend to rob the teachers then start shooting the four-year-olds, continuing in another classroom if necessary to achieve the target of 30 children.
‘You wanted to cause the biggest massacre in 21st century as there had not been one.
‘Your mother waking up at about 4.50am had triggered your activity early. You wished you had killed more.’
At the Court of Appeal today, three senior judges declined to replace his life sentence, with a minimum term of 49 years, with a whole life order.
Giving their ruling, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr said: ‘Appalling though these crimes were, we are not persuaded that anything less than a whole life order was unduly lenient.
‘It is a sentence which requires a youth of 18, as he was at the time of his arrest, to remain in custody until he is in his late 60s, and one which might result in him never being released.
‘Finally, as the courts have stated repeatedly, no sentence can ever reflect the value of lives lost.’
Why didn’t Nicholas Prosper get a whole life sentence in the first place?
Whole-life orders are reserved for the most serious offences, with those handed the tariffs including Louis De Zoysa, who murdered Metropolitan Police Sergeant Matt Ratana in 2020, and Kyle Clifford, who murdered his ex-partner Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah Hunt and mother Carol Hunt last year.
Rules were changed in 2022 to allow younger defendants aged 18 to 20 to receive such orders in exceptional circumstances, but none of the whole-life orders imposed since then have been on criminals in that age bracket.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb set out why he would not receive a whole-life term, in line with what both the prosecution and defence barristers had argued the previous day.
She explained that for defendants over the age of 21, whole-life orders can be considered in cases involving two or more murders with a significant degree of pre-meditation or planning, or where one child is killed with similar pre-planning.
The judge said: ‘The court may arrive at a whole-life order in the case of an 18 to 20-year-old only if it considers that the seriousness of the combination of offences is exceptionally high, even by the standard of offences which would normally result in a whole-life order.
‘This is described accurately as an enhanced exceptionality requirement.
‘Despite the gravity of your crimes, it is the explicit joint submission of counsel that a lengthy, finite term will be a sufficiently severe penalty, and this is not such an exceptionally serious case of the utmost gravity where the sentence of last resort must be imposed on an offender who was 18 at the time and is 19 today.’
While Prosper is ‘indisputably a very dangerous young man’, the risk to the public is met with a life sentence, she said.
‘The question is whether in ensuring due punishment, the seriousness of the offences overall is such that it is not possible, consistent with my duty to the public, to specify any minimum term,’ the court was told.
She said she would not impose a whole-life order because Prosper was stopped from carrying out the school shooting, having murdered his family earlier than he intended after his mother woke up.
He also pleaded guilty as soon as the charges were put to him after psychiatric reports had been completed, and he was 18 at the time of his crimes which is at the lowest end of the age bracket for whole-life terms.
‘Was the judge wrong?’
Tom Little KC, for the Solicitor General, told the Court of Appeal: ‘What the facts reveal is a case which, on any view, was exceptional, even in the context of a murder.
‘This reference turns on a single issue.’
He continued: ‘Was the judge wrong not to impose a whole life order, or was such a sentence the only sentence reasonably open to her, on the facts of this very unusual case?’
Mr Little added: ‘It was a murder of three people, two of them were children, including the intended rape of the sister. That did not take place, but it had been intended.
‘The murders were committed one after the other in their own home, heard by neighbours and each was aware they were being killed by their son or sibling, and one pleaded, that is the brother, for his life.’
Mr Little also said: ‘It is difficult to see how this did not involve substantial premeditation and planning.’
David Bentley KC, representing Prosper at the Court of Appeal, said that his client ‘clearly had an undiagnosed neurological condition’ which contributed to the crimes.
He continued: ‘It is very difficult to say how a 49-year sentence in itself, with all this background, can be said to be unduly lenient.’
Mr Bentley acknowledged that if Prosper was aged 21 or over, it ‘would have been very difficult to argue” that he should not have been given a whole-life order.
He said: ‘The reality is that with the existing sentence, the earliest date he could actually be considered for parole is in his late 60s, and the dangerousness is covered by the life sentence.
‘As the court knows, if he remains considered to be dangerous, he never comes out anyway, so a life sentence is a life sentence, and the minimum term simply provides a time when it can be reviewed.’
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