Sentencing Bill [HL]

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 25th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate David Ormerod, parliamentary counsel and the Law Commission for the production of this outstanding work. The heart of it is Part 4, which deals with the exercise of judicial discretion. The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has reminded me of a particular judge I remember from the good old days, who almost as a matter of principle used to pass sentences beyond the maximum. He did so because he had been a miner in his youth—a Bevin boy—before he went to Oxford. He regarded anybody who attacked or preyed upon their community as someone who deserved condign punishment, so he would sentence them to whatever sentence of imprisonment he thought appropriate. It was quite admirable, really, but the Court of Appeal had to spend a whole day dealing with the sentences that he had inflicted.

The issues that, to my mind, are very important are contained in Clause 57, which deals with the discretion of the judge. The tramlines have been laid down for some years by the sentencing guidelines and, of course, the method of sentencing—the formula—which is that you take the sentencing guidelines and add to it if there are aggravating features and reduce it if there are mitigating features. That is well known, but it can be rather formulaic. The Bill states that those tramlines must be followed unless it is in the interests of justice that it should be otherwise.

Many years ago, I prosecuted a lady who had put a hammer through the skull of her husband and dragged his body into the back room of the basement flat in which they lived. There the body lay for some 20 years until a neighbour from upstairs was taking up his floor and discovered the skeleton. The case went to court and I remember that the lady concerned pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of provocation. The learned judge said to her that he could not imagine the agony that she must have gone through in living with that body behind the curtain, and bringing up her children, over so many years. He said, “I am not sending you to prison. I am not going to impose probation; that would be ridiculous. I am not going to give you a conditional sentence just in case you were inclined to commit a similar offence within the next two years. That would be absurd. I am going to give you an absolute discharge.” That is exactly what he did. That very experienced High Court judge was reacting as a human being to the situation as he saw it—the circumstances in which this lady had lived. Consequently, he passed that sentence with great humanity and I applaud him for it.

It is good that the power of giving an absolute discharge has been maintained in Clause 79. It states that an absolute discharge should be given only if the judge finds it wrong to pass a sentence of imprisonment upon a defendant. The wording used suggests that the power should be used only where a person is terminally ill, or something of that sort. That is not entirely the right approach. That sentence should be available to the judge in the exercise of their proper discretion, as the judge to whom I referred exercised his—as a human being, as much as a judge.

As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, there has been a proliferation of sentence disposals since 2000. There have been all sorts of orders: withdrawal orders, reparation orders, financial punishments and so on. They have become a morass in the past 20 years and it is good that it is about to be disposed of. A judge today will have before him a code, through the Bill, that he can exercise with discretion and justice. I am sure that all will profit as a result. I fully commend the Bill and hope that it passes all its stages without problems.