Coroners and Justice Bill

I am very attracted to the ingeniously simple wording of the amendment and am a strong supporter of it. It would stop, as the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said, the performance of stretching the criteria of diminished responsibility, which should surely be constrained to those whose diminished responsibility is a result of a mental disorder or disability or some other specific criteria. At the moment, we know that the diminished responsibility rules are fudged in relation to mercy killing. There is a very good reason for introducing it into this legislation. In a later group of amendments we shall debate at length the subtle changes to the criteria on diminished responsibility, which will have the effect of making them slightly more difficult to use because their description is going to be slightly tightened up. Many psychiatrists have pressed for this to make them more consistent with current medical practice, but it means that it will make them more difficult to use in circumstances where this amendment would be of great utility. We will come on much later to the issue of infanticide, but one of the major reasons for preserving the extraordinary current law of infanticide is that there seems to be no other way to deal with the very young women who give birth, are in a state of distress and kill the child quickly. That is a dreadful circumstance, which at the moment is catered for under infanticide as it is extremely difficult to fit them into the formal diminished responsibility criteria. It will be more difficult to fit them into other criteria. Of course infanticide does exist, and it is intended that it should exist, but I hope to convince the Committee that it should not continue. If the Bill were amended in this way it would deal with many of the problems that we are making for ourselves with regard to diminished responsibility and would allow us to tackle other cases such as mercy killing.