Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, there is certainly a unanimity of view in the debate thus far that the present system is not satisfactory. It should perhaps be pointed out that there have been very few instances of compassionate release, including three cases arising out of the Good Friday agreement and the case of the East End criminal, Reggie Kray, but that is a little beside the point. My problem, such as it is, with the noble and learned Lord’s amendment, is more in the rubric than in the intention. It is clear that there will always be some cases in which release will not and should not occur. I suspect that there will be few, but there will be some. The public need to be persuaded that the people who are not reformed and who might well continue to constitute a danger will not be released. There will always be a small number of those. The amendment refers to the, "““Duty to release certain prisoners serving a whole life sentence””." I can see whence that comes—that is the end of the process, as it were, which would be acceptable—but as it stands, the wording seems to imply an implicit or explicit duty to release prisoners serving a whole life sentence instead of posing the duty to consider the release. With respect to the noble and learned Lord, that would have been a better way to phrase the amendment and would give the public more assurance than what appears on the face of it—and I appreciate that it is only on the face of it—to be an absolute duty to release certain prisoners serving a whole life sentence.