Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. The fear of being perceived to be soft on crime, the jurisprudential basis rightly identified by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, is nonsensical in this context. It has for some time been the case that the mandatory life sentence does not consist at all of a life sentence: it consists in all but a few cases of a penal element expressed at the trial in the form of a term of years communicated to the defendant, following which the defendant is considered for release by reference to whether it is safe to release him or her. The only argument advanced by the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General in Committee in response to the points made was that the life sentence enables the defendant to be recalled to prison at any time during his or her life. If that is the aim of the life sentence, and the only aim, surely that objective can be achieved by confining the life sentence, as the amendment would, to cases where there are circumstances which justify a lifelong condition and the possibility of recall for the whole of the individual's life. There is no basis for those conditions where there are extenuating circumstances which make the prospect of repetition of the offence nonexistent. I also remain concerned, as I explained in Committee, that under the current law, there are cases where the jury is simply unwilling to convict of murder, although that is the true verdict, because it is unwilling to subject the defendant to a mandatory life sentence, because that is manifestly unjustified in the circumstances of the case.