George Beglan holds an LLM (Distinction) from Durham and read Jurisprudence at Oxford; he has published on law reform in the Cambridge Law Review
And so the U-turns begin again, less than a month in.
Downing Street’s line on PC Andrew Harper’s killers is that you cannot carve out ‘one or two offenders’ from the early release scheme without excluding manslaughter wholesale. Fine: exclude it wholesale. The government has treated this as a reductio ad absurdum, when it is simply the answer.
The premise is worth restating, lest the severity of the deeds concerned be lost in later monotony. Manslaughter is not a lesser category of homicide which merely happens to attract confusion about intent. It is, in England and Wales, the label the law reaches for whenever a killing falls short of murder’s mental element but still ends a life through an unlawful act or gross negligence.
Unlawful act manslaughter alone covers everything from a single punch that goes wrong to, as in Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers’s case, dragging a police officer a mile down a country road behind a getaway car. That the offence sits below murder on the statute book tells you nothing about the moral gravity of what actually happened. The verdict reflects the absence murderous intent (hence the distinction), not the absence of a killing.
Given that, the discovery that manslaughter convictions were ever swept into a scheme built to release prisoners at 40 per cent of sentence should not require a public outcry and an 880,000-signature petition to surface. It should have been obvious at the drafting stage that a category encompassing some of the most violent non-murder offences in the criminal calendar was an odd one to leave off an exemptions list that already covers rape and serious sexualoffences against children.
Rape is rightly treated as too serious for early release. Killing a police officer by dragging him under a car for over a mile, apparently, is not.
Number 10’s defence is that manslaughter cannot be surgically excluded for the two men who killed PC Harper without pulling everyone convicted of manslaughter out of the scheme. This is true, and it is not the objection ministers seem to think it is. Nobody serious has asked for bespoke legislation naming Cole and Bowers.
The ask is that manslaughter, as a category, join rape and serious child sexual offences on the list of crimes too grave for automatic release atless than half of sentence served. If that costs the scheme more prison capacity than ministers had budgeted for, that is a resourcing problem, and resourcing problems get solved by building capacity or sentencing more precisely at the point of conviction, not by quietly deciding that killing someone is not, after all, disqualifying.
What the government has actually revealed is a hierarchy of political convenience. Excluding rape was cost-free: no minister was going to be pilloried for it, just the opposite and rightly so.
Excluding manslaughter means admitting that the scheme’s architecture was wrong, and wrong in a way that implicates the people who designed it. So instead we get the ‘not possible’ line, dressed up as a drafting constraint when it is a choice about which embarrassments and which costs the government is prepared to absorb.It is not impossible to fix this. It requires adding one line to an exemptions list that already runs to several categories, and accepting that the scheme will release marginally fewer people, marginally more slowly. What is missing is not a legal mechanism.
It is the will to tell the public that the family of a man dragged to his death by a getaway car deserves the same protection from early release as any other victim whose killer’s crime happened to carry a different label.
Mechanisms described, the remainder is a matter of political will. At this rate, Burnham will be another Labour Prime Minister hoisted by the petard of Blair’s civil service, another political suit dominated by the civil corps.
George Beglan holds an LLM (Distinction) from Durham and read Jurisprudence at Oxford; he has published on law reform in the Cambridge Law Review
And so the U-turns begin again, less than a month in.
Downing Street’s line on PC Andrew Harper’s killers is that you cannot carve out ‘one or two offenders’ from the early release scheme without excluding manslaughter wholesale. Fine: exclude it wholesale. The government has treated this as a reductio ad absurdum, when it is simply the answer.
The premise is worth restating, lest the severity of the deeds concerned be lost in later monotony. Manslaughter is not a lesser category of homicide which merely happens to attract confusion about intent. It is, in England and Wales, the label the law reaches for whenever a killing falls short of murder’s mental element but still ends a life through an unlawful act or gross negligence.
Unlawful act manslaughter alone covers everything from a single punch that goes wrong to, as in Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers’s case, dragging a police officer a mile down a country road behind a getaway car. That the offence sits below murder on the statute book tells you nothing about the moral gravity of what actually happened. The verdict reflects the absence murderous intent (hence the distinction), not the absence of a killing.
Given that, the discovery that manslaughter convictions were ever swept into a scheme built to release prisoners at 40 per cent of sentence should not require a public outcry and an 880,000-signature petition to surface. It should have been obvious at the drafting stage that a category encompassing some of the most violent non-murder offences in the criminal calendar was an odd one to leave off an exemptions list that already covers rape and serious sexualoffences against children.
Rape is rightly treated as too serious for early release. Killing a police officer by dragging him under a car for over a mile, apparently, is not.
Number 10’s defence is that manslaughter cannot be surgically excluded for the two men who killed PC Harper without pulling everyone convicted of manslaughter out of the scheme. This is true, and it is not the objection ministers seem to think it is. Nobody serious has asked for bespoke legislation naming Cole and Bowers.
The ask is that manslaughter, as a category, join rape and serious child sexual offences on the list of crimes too grave for automatic release atless than half of sentence served. If that costs the scheme more prison capacity than ministers had budgeted for, that is a resourcing problem, and resourcing problems get solved by building capacity or sentencing more precisely at the point of conviction, not by quietly deciding that killing someone is not, after all, disqualifying.
What the government has actually revealed is a hierarchy of political convenience. Excluding rape was cost-free: no minister was going to be pilloried for it, just the opposite and rightly so.
Excluding manslaughter means admitting that the scheme’s architecture was wrong, and wrong in a way that implicates the people who designed it. So instead we get the ‘not possible’ line, dressed up as a drafting constraint when it is a choice about which embarrassments and which costs the government is prepared to absorb.It is not impossible to fix this. It requires adding one line to an exemptions list that already runs to several categories, and accepting that the scheme will release marginally fewer people, marginally more slowly. What is missing is not a legal mechanism.
It is the will to tell the public that the family of a man dragged to his death by a getaway car deserves the same protection from early release as any other victim whose killer’s crime happened to carry a different label.
Mechanisms described, the remainder is a matter of political will. At this rate, Burnham will be another Labour Prime Minister hoisted by the petard of Blair’s civil service, another political suit dominated by the civil corps.