The Murder of Henry Nowak: What the Sentencing Remarks Reveal

On the night of 3 December 2025, 18-year-old Henry Nowak was walking home to his university accommodation in Portswood, Southampton, after an evening out. He was alone, unarmed, and a little over half a mile from his bed. He never arrived. On 1 June 2026, at Southampton Crown Court, His Honour Judge William Mousley KC — the Honorary Recorder of Southampton — sentenced 23-year-old Vickrum Singh Digwa to life imprisonment for his murder.¹

This article is built on the judge’s own sentencing remarks, which the court released and which are linked at the end. That matters, because a great deal has been written and said about this case, some of it inaccurate, and the remarks are the most careful and authoritative account available of what the court actually found. They are also, in places, very different from the impression left by the headlines — including on the question that most concerns a site about policing: how the officers who reached Henry first behaved.

A note before going further. This case involves race and religion, and it has been seized upon by people with agendas of their own. The judge addressed that directly, and this piece tries to follow his lead: to set out the facts plainly, to keep faith with a grieving family, and to be fair to everyone the evidence touches — including a wider community that did nothing wrong.

Who Henry was

Judges do not have to describe the people whose deaths they are sentencing. Judge Mousley chose to. Henry, he said, was “a much-loved, kind, hard-working and ambitious young man, devoted to his family and with a bright future.” He was a first-year student at Southampton University and the first in his family to go to university — “careful and principled, full of humour, warmth and promise.”¹

The remarks set out the family’s own words at length. Henry’s father, Mark Nowak, described the trauma of identifying his son’s body and said the family had effectively been handed “a life sentence” of their own. His mother, Lucy Ross, recalled the anguish of having to tell Henry’s elderly grandparents. His sister, Olivia, said her world had “fall[en] apart” — she had lost not only a brother but her closest companion. Step-parents David Stevenson and Katie Woodcock described grief reaching into every corner of ordinary life, including younger children left frightened and unsettled.¹ None of this is incidental. It is the court formally recording the size of the loss.

What happened that night

Shortly after 11pm, Henry was walking north along Belmont Road. Digwa happened to be walking south on the same pavement. The judge was clear that this was “a chance meeting” — not a planned confrontation.¹

Digwa was carrying a large Sikh dagger in a sheath on a belt, worn over his clothing. Here the remarks are careful and worth quoting, because they are easy to misread. It is a requirement of the Sikh faith to carry a knife, the kirpan — usually small and hidden. Digwa belonged to an order of Sikhs, the Nihang, with a tradition of also carrying a second, visible blade. The judge took expert evidence on this and was at pains to explain that the kirpan “is worn as a symbol of religious faith and is never to be carried for an offensive purpose,” and that the law tolerates it precisely because it is understood never to be used aggressively except, like anything else, in genuine and reasonable self-defence. The point the judge drew from this was not about Sikhism. It was about responsibility: carrying “a highly dangerous weapon, easily accessible,” he said, “brings with it huge responsibility.”¹

As the two passed, Henry — who was filming on his phone — made a comment, asking if Digwa was a “bad man.” It is reasonable to think, the judge said, that Henry had simply noticed the unusual sight of a large sheathed dagger. The judge was explicit that Henry’s tone “was not aggressive or threatening,” even if it proved “a tragic error of judgment.” Digwa, feeling disrespected and intruded upon, moved towards Henry, said that he was “a bad man,” and took his phone. What followed was witnessed only by the two of them, but it is likely Henry wanted his phone back, believing he had been robbed, and that a struggle followed in which Digwa’s turban — itself a fundamental religious item — may have been knocked off, adding to his anger.¹

None of that came close to justifying what Digwa did next, and the judge said so squarely: in that situation “there was every need for self-restraint and control on your part… Strong words, even a verbal threat, might have been justified but no more.”¹ Instead, Digwa drew the dagger and deliberately stabbed Henry in the chest. The blade passed 8cm in, between the two uppermost ribs, catching a lung and cutting a major vein. He stabbed Henry three more times — twice to the upper leg and once to the lower abdomen — and slashed his face, though the judge could not be sure the facial wound was aimed. One of the blows took immediate effect: Henry, the judge found, “was never able to put up his hands to defend himself. He was defenceless.”¹

One finding here is essential to everything that follows. The pathologist, Amanda Jeffrey, found over two pints of blood in Henry’s chest cavity and concluded that the wound was unsurvivable: he “would not have survived, however quickly he received first aid, CPR or expert medical treatment.”¹ By contrast, Digwa had little or no injury — no independent evidence of the bruise he later claimed.

The aftermath, and the lies

What the judge described next he characterised as “a callous disregard” for Henry’s life. As Henry, badly wounded, tried to escape — scaling a fence, climbing onto a bin, landing on a car — Digwa filmed him. He told Henry, and the people nearby, that no stabbing had happened and that Henry was exaggerating. When his brother arrived and asked whether there had been racism, Digwa invented it, falsely claiming Henry had directed a racial slur at him. The judge was unequivocal: “I am sure that Henry had said nothing racist… it is completely at odds with his previous character.” (The slur is quoted in the remarks; it is not repeated here.)¹

The deception widened. Digwa told his mother to take the murder weapon, its sheath and the belt away — she did, and was later convicted of assisting an offender, an offence covering help given to someone after a crime to evade justice. (She is to be sentenced separately on 17 July 2026, so her case is not pre-judged here.) Digwa kept Henry’s phone, which held footage incriminating him, and gave police a false account. In a police van two days later, secretly recorded and speaking Punjabi, he agreed with his brother to pretend he had acted in self-defence — even as he admitted stabbing Henry, including to the chest — and worried aloud about whether CCTV existed that would expose the lie. That self-defence account, finally advanced at trial, was rejected by the jury and, the judge added, “by me too.”¹

What the judge found about the police response

This is the part most relevant to policing, and the part where the sentencing remarks differ most sharply from the public narrative. Bodyworn footage of an officer handcuffing a dying young man is genuinely distressing, and it understandably provoked anger. But the judge — who had seen the evidence in full — reached measured conclusions, and fairness requires reporting them.

The attending officers, he found, “honestly believed that there were reasonable grounds for suspecting Henry had committed an offence” and arrested him, with the result that he “was handcuffed for about a minute before his condition further deteriorated and the arresting officer began CPR.”¹ Crucially, the judge located the cause of that mistake in Digwa’s deception: “The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident.” It was dark; Henry wore a dark top through which the knife’s entry was not obvious; the blood that was visible did not clearly come from the chest; the facial wound that could be seen was not life-threatening. Henry was saying he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe, “but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become” — and, the judge noted candidly, “it is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released.”¹

His conclusion about the officer who gave CPR is worth quoting in full: “These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.”¹

Two things should be held together honestly. First, the judge’s findings are sympathetic to the officers and place responsibility for the confusion on the man who created it: he listed Digwa’s deception of the police — leading them to arrest Henry and to give first aid “in ignorance of the fact that he had a serious chest wound” — as an aggravating feature of the murder. Second, the judge’s remarks are not the final word on police conduct, which is not his role. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which independently scrutinises serious police incidents, is separately investigating the officers’ contact with Henry, including the use of handcuffs and the first aid given. That investigation has since progressed: having initially treated the officers as witnesses, the IOPC has said it is now examining whether they breached professional standards on the use of force, their duty of care and the respect and courtesy owed to Henry — a shift that does not pre-judge the outcome but does mean the officers’ own conduct, not only Digwa’s deception, is formally under scrutiny. The Police and Crime Commissioner has commissioned a wider independent review, and Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary has apologised to the family for aspects of the initial response.²³⁴ Those processes deserve to run their course.

If there is an evidence-based lesson here, it is a difficult and unglamorous one. It is not that the officers were callous; the court found the opposite. It is that a determined, plausible liar can turn the instincts of a reasonable responder against a victim — and that the honest finding that Henry could not have been saved sits alongside, not against, the case for forces continuing to ask how an injured person’s own words can be weighed when everything else at a chaotic scene is pointing the wrong way. Both can be true at once. Resisting the urge to collapse them into a simpler, angrier story is itself part of thinking carefully about policing.

The sentence, explained

For murder, a life sentence is mandatory. What a judge sets is the minimum term — the period that must be served in full before the Parole Board can even consider release. It is not a release date, and any eventual release is on a life-long licence, with recall to prison for any breach.¹

The starting point is fixed by statute (Schedule 21 of the Sentencing Act 2020). The judge took 15 years, explaining that this “did not involve taking a knife to the scene with the purpose to use it to commit an offence” — Digwa may have had a lawful reason to carry the dagger when he met Henry, though “that reason must have come to an end after you removed it from its sheath” — and that it was not a killing for gain.¹

He then set out ten aggravating factors, including the three further stab wounds; the mental suffering inflicted on Henry as he lay dying, both by Digwa’s attitude and by lies that led to Henry himself being arrested; the degradation of filming his suffering; the sustained attempts to conceal evidence and pervert the course of justice; drawing his mother into that; Henry’s vulnerability as an 18-year-old, alone and unarmed; the wider community impact; the deception of the police; and the abuse of “the privilege extended to Sikhs to have a knife in a public place for religious reasons.” Together these raised the term to 23 years.¹

Three mitigating factors brought it back down to 21 years: Digwa’s age, his previously clean record, and a lack of premeditation — for although the judge was “sure that you intended to kill in the moments before you stabbed Henry,” he accepted the killing was not planned. After deducting the 175 days Digwa had already spent on remand, the sentence formally pronounced was life with a minimum term of 20 years and 190 days, with two years’ imprisonment, concurrent, for the bladed-article offence.¹ The sentence is now being tested from both directions: the Attorney General’s office has indicated it is considering whether to refer it to the Court of Appeal under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme — a routine procedural check in cases like this, not a finding that anything went wrong — while Digwa himself is seeking to appeal against both his conviction and his sentence.⁵

A word the judge thought worth saying

The judge closed part of his remarks on a point that bears repeating in full, because it is the antidote to the worst uses of this tragedy. Digwa, he said, had “brought shame upon your family, your community and your religion,” and his actions had “stirred up racial tension in Southampton and across the country which have made many Sikhs worried about their own safety even though they have done absolutely nothing wrong.”¹

That is the careful conclusion to draw from this case. A young man was murdered by one individual who misused, and dishonoured, something many others carry lawfully and peacefully. The grief belongs to Henry’s family. The guilt belongs to the man who was convicted. And the questions that remain — about how the first minutes at a violent scene are handled — belong to the independent reviews now under way, which should be allowed to answer them on the evidence, rather than on the noise around them.

Footnotes

1. Sentencing remarks of His Honour Judge William Mousley KC, R v Vickrum Singh Digwa, Southampton Crown Court, 1 June 2026. Full remarks (PDF). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

2. Statement regarding the IOPC investigation into contact Hampshire and Isle of Wight officers had with Henry Nowak — Independent Office for Police Conduct. https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/news/statement-regarding-our-investigation-contact-hampshire-and-isle-wight-officers-had-henry ↩

3. PCC to commission independent review into police response to the murder of Henry Nowak — Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner. https://www.hampshire-pcc.gov.uk/pcc-to-commission-independent-review-into-police-response-to-murder-of-henry-nowak ↩

4. Police bodycam footage released following conviction of Henry Nowak’s killer — ITV News Meridian / Police Professional. https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2026-06-01/man-who-murdered-student-with-sikh-ceremonial-knife-jailed-for-life ↩

5. Attorney general ‘considering’ jail sentence of Henry Nowak’s murderer — ITV News Meridian. https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2026-06-02/attorney-general-considering-jail-sentence-of-henry-nowaks-murderer. On Digwa’s own appeal against conviction and sentence, see subsequent reporting (e.g. Yahoo News, “Henry Nowak’s killer appeals conviction and sentence”). ↩