Professor John Mee:

It would be an arbitrary sentence. It would be like saying that all killers born on a Tuesday should lose X. Celine Cawley put up money to put property into joint names. If she had put up money to give her husband a free gift of the property, that property would be untouched. That is what I mean when I say arbitrariness. This is what the Constitution and jurisprudence looks at. We cannot just say killers are bad people and we want to take something off them. That is fine but we must take it from everybody. We cannot just say that if a killer happens to have jointly owned property with the victim, we will take it off him or her, but if not, he or she can keep all of his or her other property.