The Wages of Appeasement Are Paid in Foolishness

On the other hand, some policy retreats are simply depressing. One of the telling and therefore ignored scandals of our time is the apparent veto the Sun newspaper has over large parts of criminal justice policy. When the Tories were in opposition the paper demanded Dominic Grieve’s head on a platter as a price for its support and was duly so treated; now it and its reactionary allies have forced the government to retreat from sensible plans for rewarding early guilty pleas with reduced sentences.

Alex Deane has a splendidly clear piece explaining why this was a mistake:

 We already reward guilty pleas in the court system, on a sliding scale with more credit for earlier pleas and less credit for later ones (and “door of the court” isn’t the latest possible time, either – one can, for a sliver of credit, even cough mid-trial). Maximum credit is available for admitting guilt at the first opportunity in court. The point is that there is presently no incentive (beyond doing the right thing) for guilty people to admit guilt from the first opportunity at the police station. We want them to do that. It saves police time. It saves prosecutorial time. It saves the time of witnesses. It saves court time. And, as our Chairman says in his Musing today, as a result of all that it saves the state a not-inconsiderable amount of money, too. […] And the whole argument against such discounts is flawed anyway. We absolutely, definitively do not have a plea bargaining system in England and Wales. Except, of course, we do. Defendants plead guilty to offence X, which carries a lesser penalty, after having established that, if they do so, the Crown will offer no evidence in relation to that crime on offence Y, which carries a greater penalty. Defendants draw up “basis of plea” documents admitting guilt but indicating that the crime was committed in a particular way, rather than on the “full facts” alleged by the Crown. The Crown will often indicate that that basis is acceptable, or at least that it can’t be gainsaid. Such things are entirely legitimate. They can also be viewed as masking what is effectively plea bargaining.  So the government was right before, and wrong now. Certainly, Ken Clarke put the arguments with an element of hamfistedness on radio, but that shouldn’t stop the cause in its tracks. Something sad has happened when the media consensus can unite with ill-placed self-righteousness, not only temporarily to overwhelm logic but moreover to defeat the government of the day, which doesn’t even try to defend the entirely correct position it held hitherto.