Hope for IPP prisoners
But reviewing each case will be a slow process
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has referred another indefinite sentence to the Court of Appeal, less than a fortnight after six such sentences were quashed by appeal judges. The latest case involves an offender who was given a minimum term of three years and remains in prison nearly 16 years later.
Daniel Grace was convicted at Leeds Crown Court in July 2010 of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and false imprisonment. Though he was 18 at the time of the offence, his sentence was wrongly imposed as one of detention for public protection — a sentence for younger offenders — instead of the better-known imprisonment for public protection (IPP).
In an announcement yesterday, the CCRC said:
A review has concluded that there is a real possibility the Court of Appeal will find that the sentencing judge made errors in his assessment of Mr Grace’s future risk and will therefore quash his… sentence.
On 23 April, the Court of Appeal quashed six indefinite sentences, three of them as the result of referrals by the CCRC. The judges have not yet published their detailed reasons.
Dame Vera Baird KC, chair of the CCRC, welcomed the court’s ruling. “The decision to refer three of these men’s sentences followed careful and detailed reviews by the commission,” she said last month.
“All the men were very young at the time they were sentenced and have spent many years beyond their original tariffs in custody,” Baird added. “The court’s judgments reflect the importance of properly considering age and maturity when imposing sentences of this nature.”
In deciding to refer the three cases, the CCRC believed there was a real possibility that the sentencing judge had failed to attach the necessary weight to the age and maturity of the offender before imposing indeterminate sentences.
Yesterday, Baird said the CCRC was looking forward to the court’s reserved judgment “for further clarity and guidance in approaching these cases”.
The CCRC is currently looking at more than 150 IPP cases. Baird encouraged anyone who believes their sentence may have been affected by last month’s ruling to apply to the commission once they have exhausted their appeal rights.
Comment
What the Court of Appeal has to decide on the facts of each case is whether an indefinite sentence was wrong in principle at the time it was passed. If so, it can substitute a fixed sentence that would normally lead to the offender’s immediate release.
That’s not as easy as saying that an offender has served very much longer than anyone would have expected at the time of conviction. But the courts have managed to find errors in principle — for example that sentencing judges have failed to take account of past guidance from the Court of Appeal — which have enabled them to put right examples of what Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, a former justice of the Supreme Court, famously described as “the greatest single stain on our criminal justice system”.
If each case has to be examined individually, it will take a long time before all offenders serving IPP sentences are considered for release. Prisoners might reasonably ask why the CCRC didn’t begin reviewing individual cases years ago. Ministers have rejected the idea of simply releasing all IPP offenders at once because some are still regarded as dangerous.
Dealing with each case individually avoids that problem. It means also that ministers in the current government are not having to deal with the admitted and much-regretted failings of the Labour home secretary who introduced the IPP scheme, Lord Blunkett.
Update 1530: the CCRC has responded to my suggestion that it should have begun reviewing individual cases years ago.
A spokesperson said:
We would like to make clear that the CCRC has been reviewing IPP and DPP cases since at least 2008 using several approaches, but with relatively few successful referrals until recently.
The first real shift came when the court indicated that some sentencing judges may not have given sufficient weight to youth and immaturity before imposing indeterminate sentences.
The CCRC has focused on such cases, achieving recent successes and identifying further potential referrals. We now await the court’s reserved judgment to understand whether its reasoning will have broader application, and will also continue to review other IPP cases, individually, on other bases.