Coroners and Justice Bill

I will address Amendment 150, which has been taken over by the noble Lord. I was, indeed, a member of the Law Revision Committee all those years ago under the chairmanship of a judge of the Court of Appeal, whose name I cannot now remember, unfortunately. I briefly served as chairman of the Law Revision Committee, but as soon as I became chairman, the committee never sat again. The noble Lord has done a good service by moving this amendment, because it shows how strange it is that we should be considering the partial defences to a charge of murder before we have determined what murder is or should be. It is all the stranger since the Government consulted the Law Commission as long ago as 2002 on the question of partial defences, received a report in 2004, and have done nothing about it since, until today. Why now? In his letter of 18 May, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, was kind enough to say that there were a number of stakeholders, among whom I would include myself, although I can never quite imagine myself as a stakeholder. I am not sure what my stake would look like. He concedes that there are a number who would prefer the Government to look at the current Law Commission proposals as a whole, and not in parts. I say amen to that. The Minister said that a number of other stakeholders took a different view. I cannot help wondering who those other stakeholders are and, more importantly, what their reasons are. Perhaps we might be told. Perhaps we can also be told the real reasons why the Government have still done nothing about the first 64 pages of the current Law Commission report, published in 2006, which set out its proposals for the new structure. It is the structure that we should be talking about today, not the partial defences. The Government have done nothing about the structure in the past two and a half years. Is the real reason simply that they cannot make up their minds? They say that they want to proceed step by step. That is all very well, provided that you take the steps in the right order. Here, they are taking step 2 before step 1, which usually ends in disaster. Having said that, I shall now turn to the amendment. I was not sure whether the noble Lord was confining himself to the terms of this amendment, or anticipating the terms of mine. I admire the drafter of the amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, for his courage in defining the law of murder in two short paragraphs. However, I cannot support his amendment, for the following reasons. Subsection (1) of the proposed new clause corresponds to the Law Commission’s definition of first degree murder, except that it leaves out the defendant who intends to kill. Intentional killers are surely the most serious of all. They should be expressly included in any definition, and certainly not left to be inferred. Subsection (2) is also unsatisfactory as it would exclude from murder the most common case in practice—the defendant who intends to cause serious injury or harm, but who is unaware that he might be likely to cause death. It would also exclude the defendant who intends to cause some harm but not serious harm, but who is aware that his act might cause death. They should be included in any definition of murder, as recommended by the Law Commission. They are too serious to be treated as manslaughter. At any rate, they should not be excluded from murder, as the amendment proposes, without very prolonged consideration which we cannot give it now. With great respect, I hope that the noble Lord will not press his noble friend’s amendment.