The Lady of Justice, The Old Bailey, London. Photo credit: Free Foto

Proposed changes to the law in the UK would abolish the automatic life-sentence given to all murderers and allow judges to give discretionary sentences. But don’t all murderers deserve life?

When a judge in the UK is faced with a murderer, the sentence given down is automatically “life”. However, Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, wants the American legal concept of first and second-degree murder introduced into British law. This means that courts could deal with a case in which a person intended to inflict grievous bodily harm differently to cases of intentional murder.

This would not only bring the UK law more in-line with the US, but would also restore the British legal system to its former glory, according to the Independent. The paper blamed recent Labour governments for the current “mess” in the UK murder laws. A succession of Home Secretaries, promising to be tough on crime, and spurned on by stories in the right-wing press, took away judges’ power to distinguish between different types of murder. The Independent argued, “the resulting rigidity reduced the judge to a robot, and cast a blanket of moral uniformity over actions that ranged from the unspeakably vile to the merciful.”

However, the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer disagreed and said the existing laws were effective. “I think broadly the view of reasonable people is that you probably do need a quite draconian law,”

Reasonable people like Baroness Newlove writing in The Sun contributed, rhetorically, “There are no degrees of death, are there?” So why should there be degrees of murder sentence? Newlove appealed: “Do not trivialise the act of murder.”

Newlove admitted, however, that her argument was based entirely on her lack of faith in the abilities of juries. “They are not versed in legal terminology and the nuances of court procedures.” A skilfull brief, she argued, could easily manipulate a jury with complex evidence and get a murderer off the hook. Thus Newlove questioned the legitimacy of the British legal system as a whole.

Stephen Pollard writing in the Daily Express was also against both the change in the murder law, and the British legal system in general. The proposed change in law “sounds so sensible in theory,” he said. But, “like much of what comes out of the mouths of lawyers, what makes sense in theory turns out in practice to be dangerous nonsense.”

According to Pollard the motivation behind such a change in the law isn’t, as Starmer said (and “as you might think”), to make the  punishment fit the crime. Pollard claimed, “It’s the very opposite: to make sure that some  murderers are treated even more leniently than they are today. The effect would be not to make the punishment fit the crime but to make punishment even less appropriate.”

However, the proposed law could allow courts to be tougher, not encourage them to be weaker. The Telegraph pointed out, like the Independent, that the current system prevents juries from ascribing relative levels of culpability, and so forces some juries to hold back on issuing a murder sentence at all. Starmer’s predecessor, Ken MacDonald, explained to the BBC, “It is not just a question of people who are not guilty being convicted, there is a risk that people who are guilty will be acquitted of murder.”

Whether for good or bad, Guy Smith writing for the BBC noted that: “Any change would need a wholesale reform of law of homicide. It would take a huge political will and a lot of parliamentary time – it’s possible but I have my doubts.”

Listen to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken MacDonald speak about degrees of murder here.