A latish evening last night in the Coroners and Justice Bill Committee in the Chamber. We finally got round to the homicide parts of the bill, which include various changes in the criteria for the partial defence of diminished responsibility. I had a number of amendments to speak to and was obliged therefore to participate throughout the debate. Listening to the expert lawyers in the house was a privilege and dare I say, highly enjoyable. I’ve been interested in the law on homicide since I served on Lord Lane’s Committee on the Penalty for Homicide back in 1992. We recommended the abolition of the mandatory life sentence as many reports had done before ours and many have since. There was almost unanimous agreement in the house last night that the cause of justice is ill served by the mandatory life sentence but the Government still wants to retain executive powers over release dates. As a result we have a complex system of partial defences to murder in order to avoid this often inappropriate sentence. We made little headway on this issue last night. But one can’t help but hope the time will come soon when some change will be introduced to reduce the number of these cases.
And to add to a pleasant evening I had dinner in the dinner break alfresco on the terrace with Lord Patel and Lady Howarth, watching the pleasure boats and waterbuses going up and down the Thames on the warmest day of the year so far.
This is an interesting tussle between legislature, Government and judiciary. I have always felt uncomfortable about Governmental interference in sentencing, I think it was Michael Howard who introduced it though I may do him a diservice.
As I remember it, the severity of the sentence and juries’ consequential reluctance to convict was one of the reasons hanging was abolished. Though the scale is reduced, the same arguments may apply with mandatory life sentencing, but the task of imagining all hypothetical circumstances in which a mandatory sentence may be unjust when trying to legislate must be challenging indeed.
It is very unsatisfactory, especially when our prisons are so overcrowded and we are desperate for places.
I had been hoping to see the Lords committee stage of the Policing + Crime Bill debate on BBC Parliament tonight, but I see your Coroners + Justice debate from yesterday is scheduled instead. I DO hope a member of the House will blog about the P+C Bill committee stage debate on Part 2, I’m sure there will be lots of interest.
stephenpaterson: For once I feel a certain amount of sympathy for the politicians here. The judiciary is from time to time given new powers or clarification and on some issues they have ignored/bypassed the intent of the law changes.
The homicide issue is a tough one though I think in this case, as a reverse to my earlier point, it is all the fault of politicians. Since the abolition of the death penalty – against public opinion of the time and long after – the life sentence was used as a bone to assuage the public. Yet as time has passed in all sentences but obviously most sensitively in murder/manslaughter cases the public understanding of the length of sentence and/or the sentences given by the judge and reported in the press has less and less baring on the reality of the sentence served. Poll after poll show a great deal of anger generated by the expectation gap. The well of trust has been so poisoned that when proposals like the above come up the public is instinctively suspicious.
We really do need a more honest sentencing to carry the pubic trust. Of course that may mean making a hard choice of more prisons -v- shorter sentences but it is probably the choice that has to be clearly made not fudged which generates a corrosive cynicism.
Croft – I agree. Parole/remission has damaged public confidence, though I suspect that the possibility of loss of it has perhaps made prisons easier to govern. From the public perspective it is as if the judiciary is speaking in an Einsteinian time warp, in which seven years only means four, or whatever. I sometimes wonder whether a case could not be made for finalising sentencing for more serious offences centrally, where decisions could be made in the light of the prison resource available.
With the Government building more and more prisons – last I heard they’d abandoned three ‘Titans’ in favour of five smaller units – and with more than a constituency’s worth of inmates already, one wonders whether the future of this sceptered shipping hazard of ours may lie as the Alcatraz of Europe.
I mean, we imprison people for such ridiculous reasons. Take this poor Chinese woman here, for example – very possibly a trafficking victim herself if you read the account carefully. What on earth purpose is served to man or beast by detaining her further before taking her back to her homeland? Note the poor thing has spent over four months behind bars already because of nonsense like this clogging up the system:
http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kentonline/newsarchive.aspx?articleid=41068
Do we really live in fear that the good men and women of Kent will down tools and set off to assist managements in running brothels unless an example is set? If they did, would the earth cease to revolve?
To return to the Noble Baroness’s blog, I did manage to see some of the debate in question on BBC Parliament last night. As I tuned in, Baroness Scotland was struggling very hard to refute an amendment tabled, I think, by Lord Lloyd. It seemed to be to the effect that a Judge in a homicide (why this Americanism?) case might propose that there were extenuating circumstances (or words to that effect) in which case, if ten jurors assented, a lesser charge would be preferred. This seemed to me to have a great deal going for it.
I did hear much of your speech, Baroness Murphy, if you’re reading, and was very impressed, but it is so very difficult to follow these things watching TV without the paperwork of the amendments, especially in a highly detailed speech such as yours.
It strikes me that it would be very helpful to all concerned if papers were available in advance on Hansard showing how actual texts of extracts of legislation would read were amendments passed, rather than just The Bill and also The Amendments separately. It would be a lot more user friendly.
I am always at a loss how the macro, meso and micro-management of the penal system, specifically the number of prison places available, seems to be assumed as a given, and at least from a public perspective, the system at a micro level (ie sentencing) seems to have no cognisance of the general picture.
The idea of the jury having a say in the substitution of a lesser charge is interesting. I can certainly see how the jury’s agreement would both act as a mild check on the judiciary but more importantly may well be viewed more sympathetically/trustingly by the public.
Stephenpaterson, I do so agree with you about the way amendments are tabled; it is difficult for us in the debate to follow how a proposed wording would alter the clause. And it is sometimes quite another to understand its implications. I was very taken with Lord Lloyd’s amendment and I hope he will bring it baack after report stage
You and Croft both make some pertinent observations about the penal system and its appparent disconnect from legislation. Public expectation however is a dangerous weathervane for politicians, personally I’d prefer they stuck with the evidence of what works in terms of reducing reoffending, deterring others and likelihood of rehabiliation. Mobs are vengeful by their nature.
I don’t think anyone wants mob rule but you can’t proceed with indifference to the public view either. The sooner the sentence parliament intends, a judge passes, and the press reports broadly matches and is seen to match the actuality of the time served the better. As I say that can be shorter sentences or more prisons but it brings the system into disrepute the way things presently are and democracy needs a level of confidence/trust in its institutions to function properly.
I think it was mentioned to Lord Renton’s committee about the bills/amendments issue and Lord Norton seems to have taken to the matter like a dog with a bone so there is hope 🙂
The Bills/Amendments issue, if it is causing members’ problems, is serious indeed. I’d hoped it was just affecting us plebs tuning in. But it seems to me that to do the job properly, anyone short of a genius would have to spend a lot of time either printing off and scribbling about with pens on paper or else do the equivalent on a computer which, given this particular exercise, may take longer.
And everyone has to duplicate each other’s efforts, taking a lot more time than necessary reinventing one anothers’ wheels, whereas it should only have to be done once, maybe with someone to check, then it could be easily available to all on the web.
It could highlight inserted text in bold and indicate deleted material with square brackets, and/or maybe with line throughs.
Wouldn’t mind chancing my arm at a go at it if somebody can suggest a not-too-ambitious piece of legislation coming up. I could create a blog or something quite easily for interested members to access, if there’s some means of communicating its existence to them.
Croft, I agree about the need to match the length of the sentence as declared in court to the reality that will be served. It seems very strange that almost all prisoners serve only half the tarrif. It would be better to sentence for shorter periods but then I fear the public wouldn’t like the apparently shorter sentences.
I was being high handed about the ‘mob’ but there is a careful balance to be struck between listening to and understanding public opinion and allowing fundamental moral attitudes to be buried by mass demand for vengeance, as we have seen so often in child homicide cases. Parliamentarians too often respond to noisy lobbies instead of the silent but more numerous middle grounders. I love the British public to bits when I meet them individually but detest them en masse!
Perhaps that’s why I hate the e-petitions on the No 10 Downing Sreet website, seems to me folk will sign anything if you wave it in front of them often enough. There’s one at present petitioning for a University in Swindon. I’m sure Swindon is a fine town for a university but why a petition? And the 30,000 or so who don’t want increased university tuition fees, well of course they don’t but there’s another side to that argument. For the same reason I hate local radio phone-ins. Radio Norfolk is a weather vane of depressing tabloid opinions.
Enough of that, let me return to s stephenpaterson’s suggestion. I fear the reason the amendment papers are produced in the way they are is for speed and the fact that parliamentary draftsmen find it easy to follow in this fashion. So there might not be much of a market for the service you have suggested. When we sit in committee we have four papers with us: 1)the marshalled list of amendments in the order they appear in clauses of the Bill, 2)the list of numbers of amendments in groupings on the daily schedule of activities (so if no. 171 is grouped with no. 2 say, you don’t slope off to the tea room at the wrong time and can tailor your speech around other amendments in that broad topic group), 3)a copy of the bill itself and 4) explanatory notes to the bill, which gives a broad idea of what each clause is meant to achieve. Sometimes there are other papers to carry such as draft regulations and regulatory impact assessment of the bill. The essential thing is not to mix up the numbers in the clauses and sections of the bill with the numbers of amendments, as I have occasionally done.
baronessmurphy – I am sure you are not alone, there were quite a few pauses and embarrassed rustlings during the committee stage of Policing and Crime the other night. The contributions, however, were well worth waiting for, and we look forward to the Report Stage with great interest.
As for the No 10 petitions, I’m in two minds. I started a six month petition myself sometime ago which did rather well, getting the backing of a significant number of academics amongst its signatories:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/sexworkers/
but sadly received a Government ‘response’ which failed to address the issues and instead merely regurgitated existing policy.
Perhaps we were expecting too much.
Interestingly the Scottish Parliament also has an ePetitions site. They also have a committee which approves or otherwise its petitions. One great boon of the Scottish system compared to No 10s, however, is that each ePetition has a forum so that those who feel strongly either way can argue the toss and present evidence in favour of their arguments.
http://epetitions.scottish.parliament.uk/
I found the lack of this a frustration with my petition, together with the ban on using hyperlinks in text (or at all).
No 10 was supposed to be considering enabling petition creators to contact fellow-signatories a maximum of twice but I know not if anything’s come of it.
There are a lot of frivolous and ill thought out ideas in many No 10 ePetitions, but I do think that if it can be compared to other ePetition systems and ideas gained from them, it is capable of much improvement. Oh, and the mySociety people were great!