Katie Wheatley, Head of our Crime, Fraud and Regulatory team, has been quoted in Solicitors Journal and Edward Fennell’s Legal Diary on the passing of the Pre-Sentence Reports Bill.

This legislation seeks to ensure that judges don’t take an offender’s race, religion, or other personal characteristics into account when deciding on pre-sentence reports.

Katie says:

The Sentencing Council that issues the guidance that has sparked this controversy was set up to ensure independence of the judiciary in sentencing decisions. In fact, the SGC consulted widely on these proposals, but no objection seems to have been raised by the Minister for Sentencing or the Justice Committee. Now the guidance has become a political football, but looking at this through a more personal lens, who would want a court to decide to send their own family member to prison, perhaps for the first time, without the judge being fully aware of all their personal circumstances including chronic medical conditions, learning disabilities or brain injury? Or the sole carer of young children, without there being very clear information about how those children will be affected? Or for women to be consigned to give birth in prison without all the relevant information? The Sentencing Council issues guidance but does not mandate the judge to impose any particular sentence. That decision is for the judge, bearing in mind all the circumstances including the seriousness of the offence and impact on the victim. Pre-Sentence Reports are prepared by the probation service to assist judges to decide what sentence to impose by providing them with information about the background of the offender which they will not otherwise have. The guidelines state PSR’s are necessary in all cases that would benefit from an assessment of a long list of factors such as the offender’s dangerousness, the nature and causes of the offender’s behaviour, the offender’s personal circumstances and any factors and the offender’s suitability for different sentences or requirements. There is then the list of cohorts where the report will normally be considered necessary to which this rushed, reactive legislation is targeted, but it is a non-exhaustive list and the guidance emphases that a PSR can still be necessary if the individual to be sentence does not fall into one of these cohorts.”

Read the article in the Solicitors Journal and Edward Fennell’s Legal Diary.