Judges baffled by sentencing laws

CRIMINALS frequently receive unduly lenient sentences because judges struggle to understand complex and antiquated laws on sentencing, the Law Commission has said.

It warned public confidence in criminal justice was at risk of being harmed when “sentencing decisions are routinely unlawful, unduly lenient or otherwise inappropriate because of the incomprehensible nature of the current law”.

The commission said judges had to contend with more than 1,300 pages of law full of outdated, inaccessible language from more than 65 Acts of parliament, some more than 600 years old.

It proposed to strip the rules down to a single, simplified sentencing code, enshrined in a new law, which it said would reduce mistakes and save £250million over 10 years by cutting the time it takes for judges to come to decisions and the number of appeals.

Prof David Ormerod QC, the law commissioner for criminal law, said: “Current sentencing laws are simply not up to standard. Our reforms will save time and money and make the law clearer and easier to apply. This will help the judiciary to navigate the law, and the wider public to understand it.”

The commission blamed a “proliferation” of ancillary orders that made the amount of material a judge had to consider larger than ever before.

Even the 1,300 pages of sentencing laws the commission compiled – from the 1361 Justices of Peace Act to the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991 – did not convey its “true complexity and inaccessibility”, the commission said.

It had been further complicated by 30 years of governments continually amending sentencing law with at least 14 major pieces of primary legislation.

“The faster such changes are made and the increased volume of such changes, the more difficult it is to locate the law and understand it,” it said.

“The consequence is that the law governing sentencing procedure is complex, difficult to locate, and difficult to understand, even for experienced judges and practitioners.”

An analysis of 262 randomly-selected cases in the Court of Appeal showed the complexity had led to “an extraordinary number of sentences that have been wrongfully passed”, it said. Of the sample of 262 cases, 95 of the sentences were wrong or unlawful.

The commission has published a Bill to enact the code and has proposed a “clean sweep” of old sentencing law. This would apply for every offence, with limited and partial exceptions where applying the current law would expose a person to a penalty greater than the punishment available at the time the offence took place.

The reform has been backed by Max Hill, the director of public prosecutions, who said it was a “significant leap forward”. The Government will now consider whether to lay the Bill before Parliament.