Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I, too, strongly support the amendment. I must apologise to the House and to my noble and learned friend Lord Lloyd for missing his opening remarks, but I think that I have heard enough of the debate to feel confident that I will not simply repeat what other people have said, no doubt with greater eloquence. The crime of murder, as we have heard, encompasses an immensely broad spectrum of circumstances that runs all the way from terrorist or gangland killings at one end of the scale to mercy killings at the other. The mandatory life sentence is a supremely blunt instrument for responding to the relevant distinctions in a properly discriminating way. Our law is saved from the charge of barbarism only by what is referred to as the benign conspiracy. Fictions of this sort are undesirable, so it is clearly desirable that the law should be amended to recognise openly and transparently the distinctions to which all noble Lords have referred. However, it is imperative, and not just desirable, that something is done now that the Government propose to narrow the scope of the defence of diminished responsibility, which provides the basis for the benign conspiracy, so that it will no longer be available. The Government, with this Bill, are implementing some of the recommendations of the Law Commission report of 2004, but they have not implemented all of them. The report called on the Government to undertake a public consultation on whether, and if so to what extent, the law should recognise either an offence of mercy killing or a partial defence of mercy killing, but the Government have not implemented that recommendation and have not undertaken the public consultation that was called for. In the absence of such a consultation and with the narrowing of the defence of diminished responsibility, the amendment, or something like it, would provide the only means of rescuing our law from the charge of barbarism that it will undoubtedly attract if the Bill goes forward in the form which the Government propose.