“Discounted” sentences become hot political potato
As many will have noted this week, the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, made some controversial comments about rape, but these were made in the wider context of the political and moral issue f whether criminal sentences should be further discounted for an early guilty plea and contrition.
As things stand, many crimes, where the defendant pleads guilty at the earliest opportunity, involve a reduction in usual sentence tariff of a third. Ken Clarke has been suggesting that this may be increased to a 50% reduction. Due to the bad publicity from his comments this week, it looks as though the debate on this issue will now go on the backburner for a few months at least. This is a good example of how politics and law, when it comes to criminal law, are not easy bedfellows.