Courts could go softer on killers by the hundred
follow the U. S. system of establishing different degrees of murder, the reforms will aim to establish a hierarchy of murder which could be called murder one, murder two and so on.
The most atrocious killings are likely to remain murder – and these could continue to attract a mandatory life sentence with a judge setting a ‘tariff’ to indicate how long the killer should spend behind bars before being considered for release.
But a number of premeditated killings which now count as murder are certain to be downgraded if the reforms go ahead.
Ministers, judges and the Law Commission itself have all made clear their view that women who kill violent domestic partners should not be considered murderers, even if they decided to kill in advance of the crime.
Mercy killings, too, are likely to be put into a less serious category. As premeditated killings, they are currently prosecuted as murders. A new definition of murder is also expected to remove from the category many crimes in which the offender did not intend to kill.
This would affect robbers or bur- glars who assault their victims. At present those who kill when intending only to inflict serious bodily harm are murderers.
In the same way, drunken youths whose fights end in a death would no longer be counted murderers.
The proposals from the Law Commission will need full- scale Parliamentary legislation to replace current statute law on murder and its punishment if they are to be put into effect.
Many of the ideas put forward by the commission in recent years have been shelved, but this report has the backing of the Home Secretary as well as senior judges and the Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald QC. It is certain to be supported by the Government.
Tories, however, are insistent that the mandatory life sentence should stay. Shadow Attorney General Dominic Grieve said: ‘ If the Government wishes to embark on a public consultation on the different categories of murder then we would participate, but we feel the taking of human life by murder is an extremely serious matter and that the usual sentence should be one of life imprisonment in such cases.’
The reform plans follow years of battles between politicians and judges about how murderers should be sentenced, and repeated controversies over landmark murder cases such as those involving Lee Clegg, Tony Martin and Sara Thornton.
Clegg, a paratrooper in Northern Ireland, was ultimately cleared after shooting at teenagers who died when their car ran through a road block. Martin, who shot and killed a teenage burglar, saw his conviction reduced to manslaughter. Thornton, who knifed the husband she said had long been violent towards her, also had her murder conviction changed to manslaughter.
Last year there were 859 criminal killings, nearly three times the number in 1964, the last year of hanging. There were also around four times as many attempted murders as in 1964.
Crimes of violence have doubled since the late 1990s and levels of robbery, which diminished after Tony Blair ordered a campaign against it in major cities in 2002, are again on the rise.
Criminologist Dr David Green, of the Civitas think tank, said: ‘Now is completely the wrong time to be sending the message that you are weakening the laws against violence, let alone murder.’