"JUSTICE has been done" said your front-page headline on the report of Christopher Lee Waddington being convicted of the murder of his partner (LET, February 17).

But how can this be so? A young woman has been slaughtered, leaving her two children motherless. The fact that the killer has been jailed for life (seven years?), is not a remedy for a mother lying in a grave, or for all the misery of the bereaved family.

Nowadays, the number of people being murdered in Britain is more than 1,000 a year. The actual figures are not readily available to the ordinary man in the street. Many more are seriously injured. Jack Straw is going to do something for the victims of crime, but, money can only help the living, not the dead.

It doesn't bring a mother back either. It also appears that if the perpetrators of such crimes get shoved in jail for a spell, then the public view is that everything can be forgiven and forgotten.

Victims can suffer for the rest of their lives, and in certain cases it hastens their deaths. Is it possible for anyone or any authority to justify such a situation? I think not.

A WALMSLEY, Greenside Avenue, Blackburn.