We all recoiled when Lucy Letby, a nurse of all things, was convicted of killing seven babies in cold blood. But this murderess had one more card up her sleeve. When called to court for the last time to receive the inevitable sentence – not only life, but in her case whole-life – she casually declined to appear. By doing so, Letby added insult to injury, constraining the grieving parents of her victims to watch the judge address an eerily empty dock.
Under the present law she was arguably within her rights. But not for much longer. The government, with it seems the full backing of Labour, has promised to change things. In future, not only will judges be able to order convicted offenders into court to be sentenced and punish them for contempt if they refuse, but prisons and police will get the power to use force to get them there.
This went down well in Middle England. Indeed, once Labour eyed this ball it was inevitable that the government would pick it up and run with it as hard as it could, especially when it was pointed out that last year at least three brutal murderers had done exactly the same disappearing act when it came to facing the music.
Will this really help the victim?
Nobody need have sympathy for the feelings of people like Lucy Letby, and her victims undoubtedly deserve all the comfort they can get. But scratch the surface, this is still a pretty doubtful scheme.
Take first the idea of ordering a convicted defendant into court for sentence on pain of punishment, and discount the argument that there is something odd about the state going to the trouble and expense of hauling a prisoner to the dock for no purpose apart from allowing others the schadenfreude of seeing him squirm there. Will this really help the victim? An obstinate con unwillingly present is likely to exude truculence and hostility. Furthermore, if he really wants to distress the victim he can simply smirk, roll his eyes, snore or do any number of other things to make his feelings known. True, in theory he could be punished for contempt if he goes too far. But good luck to the judge who tells him ‘one more roll of the eyes and you go down,’ to be answered (perhaps) ‘I couldn’t help it, m’lud: I was looking at a fly.’ The only casualties are likely to be the victims’ sanity and the court’s dignity.
And this all assumes that the defendant comes voluntarily. If he refuses and has to be dragged kicking and screaming into court, to be held there by force while the judge tells him in reasoned tones what is going to happen to him, this might well cause even more trouble. Will any victim really derive much comfort from seeing a dishevelled criminal struggling and possibly interrupting while being held up by two burly warders for ten minutes or more to give the appearance of listening to what he does not wish to hear? Make up your own mind.
If the defendant wants to defeat the procedure this should not be too difficult either: all he has to do is shout, scream and wave his arms. If only for the sake of keeping order the judge will fairly quickly be constrained to order him returned to the cells. The result? A great deal of trouble, expense and possible injury to warders incurred for no return at all.
Of course, in theory this could be curbed by the judge’s power to sentence a vociferous defendant – or in this case augment an existing sentence – for contempt. But whether this would be effective is another matter. A murderer contemplating a long stretch in prison may well not be much swayed by the possibility of a short extra stretch ten or twenty years from now. For that matter, for someone in Lucy Letby’s position not even this will apply: if she is already going to spend the rest of her life locked up come what may, there is literally nothing the court can do if she makes its life difficult.
In practice, one suspects that for all its support from both sides of the Commons, this proposed change will be a pretty damp squib. Note one point: even if enacted, it will not force all defendants into the dock for sentence, but merely give the judge the power to order their appearance. And it seems rather likely that this will be a power rarely, if ever, exercised. A judge faced with evidence that a defendant is likely to refuse to attend may well reason that nothing much will be lost if he is absent, and it is not worth putting the legal and prison system to the trouble of ordering him up. We can also surmise that if a determined defendant says that, for example, he thinks his mental health will be at risk if he is forced to attend, it would be a brave judge who thought it worth forcing the issue.
But perhaps we should not get too excited about this. True, a power ill-thought-out but unlikely to enforced will lie on the statute-book. On the other hand, if on balance its presence makes both political parties and the country at large happier, and no-one apart from earnest commentators and academic purists are likely to complain, perhaps this is no big deal. That’s politics for you.
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