Clause 39
Coroners and Justice Bill
10:45 am
David Howarth (Cambridge, Liberal Democrat)
My position is the same as the Law Commission’s, that what we should do is to say where the mandatory life sentence should apply, which is in a narrow range of cases—although in some instances, the Law Commission pointed out that there are some anomalies where it should, but does not, apply now. We start with what we want to define as murder, which gives us the scope of the mandatory life sentence. I would be happy then to have very narrow defences, as under the Bill, because if we have a mandatory life sentence, we should not allow pathways out of it—we have decided that it is mandatory—but then the rest should consist of optional sentences for murder two and manslaughter. I prefer to do that through definitions of offences rather than using slippery defences, as under the Bill.
Returning to the point that I was making, juries will have their way with such defences anyway. If the Government went too far in trying to narrow the defences, all that would happen is that in reality—though not in the world of law—we would have something like the French system; in France, there is a general rule that extenuating circumstances, as found by the jury, remove the mandatory life sentence. Returning to the Minister’s comments, it might well be, after a number of years of trying to renew a set of definitions, that we come to the conclusion that the best thing that we can do is keep up with reality itself and move to something like the French system.