Read the full judgment in the Chindamo case

The solicitor for the killer of the headmaster Philip Lawrence claimed today the Government has no chance in its appeal against a ruling that his client should be allowed to stay in the UK.

Learco Chindamo, 26, the Italian-born youth who knifed Mr Lawrence to death in 1995, was given the right to stay in this country by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal yesterday.

The decision has been attacked by Mr Lawrence’s widow, Frances, and has renewed the controversy over the Human Rights Act and the Government’s expressed desire to deport foreign criminals who have committed crimes in the UK.

The Home Office argued at the hearing in Central London in March this year that Chindamo’s continued presence in the UK was not “conducive to the public good” and that deportation was not disproportionate.

However, the killer’s lawyers pointed to his record in prison and an assessment of the likelihood of him re-offending to persuade the tribunal that this was not the case.

They also highlighted prison reports which said that Chindamo had been a “model prisoner” and had been assessed as unlikely to re-offend if released by the Parole Board on life licence.

Today Mr Leskin told Times Online that he did not see any way that the Government could be granted an appeal. “I do not see they have any grounds of appeal because it can only be on a point of law and there is no legal issue here I can see because it is a matter of facts.”

The killer’s lawyers told the tribunal that deporting their client was illegal as he was from a European Union country and had lived in the UK for ten years by 1995.

The case was unusual because the tribunal also had to take into account Chindamo’s length of continuous residence in Britain even though almost half of his 21 years in the UK have been spent behind bars.

Mr Leskin said that it would be “disproportionate” to deport him because he had no connections with Italy and did not even speak the language.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the courts have not upheld our decision to pursue deportation in this case.

“We believe that foreign prisoners who have committed serious crimes should face automatic deportation from the UK at the end of their sentence. We have said we are going to appeal and that is the process we will be taking.”

Mr Lawrence’s widow, Frances, has attacked the decision to allow the killer to remain in the UK because deportation would breach his human rights.

She said that she was “devastated” to learn that Chindamo has won his appeal against being sent to Italy if the Parole Board agrees to release him from prison.

“I am utterly depressed that the Human Rights Act has failed to encompass the rights of my family. I feel that I have always been a staunch advocate of the Human Rights Act but it must encompass some responsibility. I can’t fight any more. I feel I can't survive this,” Mrs Lawrence said.

“In Article 2 of the Human Rights Act my husband had the right to life.

“Chindamo destroyed that right yet he has used the legal process to enable him to live as described in Article 8.

“The Act works in his best interest. It is ill-equipped to work in my family or for people in my situation. That seems to me a major conundrum,” she told BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

Mrs Lawrence attacked the “hypocritical” sympathy offered by Chindamo’s solicitor.

She said: “I don’t want his sympathy, which I find hypocritical, or his condescension and his ridiculous notion that it is a big world and I am unlikely to bump into Chindamo.

“This misses the point spectacularly. He doesn’t know me and yet his is implying that I am a small-minded person, that I care only about my feelings and not the wider picture.

“I just feel... that when we speak of morality we have only got to speak of the word and we are derided. When we speak of the relationship between rights and responsibilities we can be heard in contempt.

“To me I see this underlying the growing problem - the plague - of knife crime and violent crime.”

Asked if she had been able to forgive Chindamo, she said: “My faith has been sorely tested. Forgiveness is such a complex issue, or maybe such a simple one, and I don’t think I really understand it yet and I am not sure what it is that I meant to do.

“This is probably very difficult because it is a very nebulous feeling but I think probably I have always forgiven Chindamo but it is the dealing with it that is difficult.

“It is the kind of visceral impact that these situations have on you.”

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, said he would be offering to meet Mrs Lawrence later today if she wished to.

Asked about Mrs Lawrence’s comments that she was under the impression that Chindamo would be deported, Mr Straw said: “She is entirely right to say that was her expectation - it was mine too.”

He told the Today programme: “I have not yet been able to see the judgment. I will study it with care.

“What I have been able to glean is that it is very probable that most of this issue arises not from the Human Rights Act but from European Union law.

“We are very vigorously appealing this. This was not our expectation that this man would be open to live in this country upon his release.”

Chindamo was jailed for life in 1996 for killing Mr Lawrence, 48, outside his school in Maida Vale, West London, in 1995. The head teacher was attacked when a gang of 12 youths, led by Chindamo, went to attack a boy who had quarrelled with a pupil of Filipino origin. The father of four was punched and stabbed by Chindamo and died the same evening.

Chindamo, a member of the Wo-Sing-Wo gang — which aspired to be the juvenile equivalent of the Triads — has always claimed another youth was the killer. He claimed that he was the victim of mistaken identity because the other youth was wearing his jacket, and that he was 30 feet away from the murder scene.

He was ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure and told that he must serve a minimum term of 12 years before he could be considered for release by the Parole Board. His minimum term expires next year.

Chindamo, who was 15 when he killed Mr Lawrence, was told the news that he could remain in the UK at the weekend. He was said to be “pleased” because his “family and life were in the UK”.

He was said to have hoped that the decision would not “cause grief” to Mrs Lawrence or her family, to whom he expressed “deepest sympathy”.

Chindamo was being prepared for release and while in Ford open prison, West Sussex, had been allowed out. But last summer at the height of the foreign national prisoner scandal he was one of hundreds of foreign inmates moved back to a closed jail.

His father is Italian, his mother from the Philippines, and he has an Italian passport. He is understood to have had little contact with his father, who was jailed in Italy for 15 years in the 1990s for hurling acid in a woman’s face in a row about drugs.

Yesterday David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “It is a stark demonstration of the clumsy incompetence of this Government’s human rights legislation that we are unable to send a proven killer back to his own country, especially when that country is in the EU.”

Alan Gordon, vice-chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, branded the decision as “absolute madness” and said he hoped that the Home Office would “appeal against this ludicrous decision”.

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