Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I have already indicated to your Lordships that I do not consider the present common law defence of provocation to be a sensible defence. It does not stand up to analysis at all. I happen to think that the Government are making it even worse in the amendments that they are proposing in the Bill. They are using various expressions that are so inadequate and so difficult to understand that a jury could not, for a moment, follow the summing up that a judge would be obliged to give. I do not need to speak at length on this. As far as I am concerned, the Government are making a major error in trying to use part of the Law Commission’s report to amend the law on homicide, instead of either taking or rejecting the whole thing. There have been calls by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for a completely new look at the whole thing. I hope that that is still his position; if it is, he will support the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, in the Division that he has suggested will happen. If the noble Lord does that, it would be quite wrong for any newspaper or journalist to suggest that the Conservative Party had, all of a sudden, become weak on crime. Had the amendment moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, been accepted, it would have strengthened the position that a person who committed murder was convicted of murder, even though there might be extenuating circumstances. These partial defences, which change the terminology simply in order to give the judge a wider sentencing power than he presently has with the mandatory life sentence, form what is just a device—and one that has outworn its usefulness. The whole of this should go.