Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

When I read the football results on a Saturday night and Blackpool have won four-three, I am not interested in whether the final goal was thought to be offside as long as it counted, but I am sure that is not a legal opinion. As has been explained, the amendment provides for the possibility of a conditional release of a prisoner serving a life sentence with a whole life tariff once he or she has served 30 years. It would produce the odd effect that an offender who had committed the most exceptionally serious crimes could be considered for release earlier than a life sentence prisoner with a determinate minimum term of more than 30 years. The minimum term or tariff under a life sentence is the period which the court determines the offender has to spend in custody for the purpose of punishment and deterrence. In other words, it reflects the seriousness of the offence. Schedule 21 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 provides guidance to the courts on the determination of a minimum term for a life sentence imposed for murder. It provides for a whole life tariff to be the starting point for the most exceptionally serious cases, where the offender was aged 21 or over at the time the murder was committed. The types of case that might attract the whole life tariff are: the murder of two or more persons where each murder involves a substantial degree of premeditated planning; the abduction of the victim or sexual or sadistic conduct; the murder of a child involving the abduction of the child or sexual or sadistic motivation; a murder done for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause; or a murder by an offender previously convicted of murder. Few would argue against these types of case representing crimes so heinous that the court may well consider the appropriate punishment to be that the offenders must be incarcerated for the rest of their lives. Those punishments are, as we would expect, rarely used. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, referred to a figure; the actual figure is that 47 prisoners are now serving a whole life tariff. We have already referred to the fact that the Government's position on this was upheld in the European Court of Human Rights. We will await the outcome of the appeal, but our position stands. Nevertheless, if a stage is reached where the continuing incarceration of a whole life tariff prisoner is found to be inhuman and degrading, for example where the person is terminally ill or severely incapacitated and poses no further risk, the Secretary of State has the power to release the prisoner on compassionate grounds. The Government do not therefore consider that it is necessary or desirable to accept this amendment. The court will have taken full account of the circumstances of the offence and the offender in determining that the whole life term is appropriate. Such appalling cases are mercifully rare, but judges can legitimately find that lifelong incarceration is necessary as a punishment. If the detention of a whole life tariff prisoner could no longer be justified and became inhuman and degrading, there is already the mechanism allowing for his or her release. On those terms, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.