Sentencing: Appeals

(asked on 4th November 2020) - View Source

Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the extension to the unduly lenient sentence scheme.


Answered by
Michael Ellis Portrait
Michael Ellis
This question was answered on 11th November 2020

The unduly lenient sentence scheme allows for sentences passed for the most serious criminal offences to be reviewed by the Court of Appeal, if referred by the Law Officers. The extension of the scheme added further serious offences to the list of those which can be referred.

In the course of this year, under the extended scheme, I have successfully referred sentences for offences of controlling and coercive behaviour, distributing indecent images of children and, most recently, stalking involving serious alarm or distress, one in which the sentence of the offender was more than doubled.

Reticulating Splines