How long is a life sentence?
Posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 by Home Office WatchCategory: Courts
Today, the Home Office tells us they don’t know how many people sentenced to life since 1997 have already been released.
This is rather surprising given that back in June last year they seemed perfectly able to access the information.
With the average life sentence now just 11 years – which makes rather a mockery of calling it “life” at all, it’s pretty important we know just how short some of these life sentences can be. Calling a one or two year sentence “life” is basically just a lie, and the government should come clean about it.
Of course, last time they came clean, the papers didn’t take kindly to the news that lifers were, as they put it, “roaming the streets”. Could the fear of bad publicity be what’s prompting Gerry Sutcliffe’s reticence? Surely not…
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March 14th, 2007 at 2:02 am
It’s really disappoining that an allegedly liberal party should stoop to this kind of deliberately misleading nonsense. The fact that people with a life sentence only serve 11 years on average does not ‘make a mockery of calling it “life” at all’, because a life sentence is an indefinite sentence, meaning that you can only be let out if the parole board determine that you are reformed. Thinking that those sentenced to life must serve a really long time is to confuse the sentence with the tariff (which is the judge’s verdict on the minimum amount of time to be served). There is no inconsistency at all in sentencing people to life whilst fully expecting to let them out after a few years. It is not ‘basically just a lie’.
What is most irritating is that you surely know all this, but you deliberately pander to the illiberal agenda of the Sun and the Daily Mail. And in doing so you degrade the standard of our political debate. Why not talk about ‘bogus asylum seekers’ too while you’re at it? Here’s a hint: you will never win an election by trying to chase after the Mail-reader vote. Your only hope is to honestly appeal to those who actually believe in liberalism. You should be defending parole, not trying to discredit it by disingenuous doublespeak.