This evening I had a conference call with a client in Atlanta. The call was at 8pm, so at 6pm I decided to grab a newspaper and go to a nearby restaurant to have supper, before I came back to work for the call.

I sat in a quiet corner of the restaurant and just above and infront of me was a small television which was showing BBC News 24. At one point my attention strayed from the Evening Standard that I was reading to a news report about John Hogan, the man who recently jumped from a hotel balcony with his two children, an action which resulted in the death of his six year-old son.

The news report featured extended clips of this both literally and metaphorically broken man, crying uncontrollably as he was charged with the murder of his son and with his own attempted suicide.

During the report the waitress came over to take my order. She saw that I was looking at the TV and looked up to the screen herself. "Such a tragedy," she said. "How could he do it?"

I've heard a lot of people say similar things about this man over the past few weeks and while I can see why it is only natural that they should ask that question (after all, how many people, with complete sobriety, jump off a fifth floor hotel balcony with a child under each arm) I can't help but feel some kind of empathy for him and affinity for where he must be right now.

It was dazzlingly apparent to me, watching the news report, that John Hogan is a man deeply and desperately in remorse for what he has done to his son, his daughter (who survived with only a broken arm), his wife and the rest of his family, not to mention himself. Infact all of the objective news reports seem to all agree that John Hogan was a loving father and that what he did was completely out of character. While my circumstances are entirely different from his, I know what it is to wake up in an intensive care unit to be told that you have tried and failed to take your own life and as a result have your world completely fall apart.

I don't, and most likely will never know, what it is like to lose a child, let alone at my own hands. But I do know what it is like to experience something akin to insanity, regardless of what caused it. Each of us are passionate and often irrational creatures capable of wild and spontaneous actions that can last mere seconds, but have consequences that change everything and last a lifetime.

While I believe that anyone who breaks the law, in what ever way they have broken the law, should be prosecuted, I also believe that there always needs to be some kind of "human" factor to take into account what that person is going through in terms of remorse for their actions. I know that this does happen in some cases, but I don't think that it happens in all.

I hope that whoever decides upon John Hogan's ultimate sentence takes into consideration the massive apparent remorse he seems to be experiencing. This is a man who no doubt will suffer as a result of what he has done for the rest of his life.

But more than that I wish there was a way that I could tell John Hogan that not everyone is asking "why" and that not everyone despises him for what he has done.