The Sentencing Review, published in May, may not have had much to say about sentence length. But now we have the Courts Review, which does. Brian Leveson’s report, published today, is hefty, at 380 pages, with 42 recommendations, many of them sensible. But it is his proposal to reduce sentences for crimes which particularly affect women which are likely to prove most controversial.
The problem Leveson is trying to solve is that the courts, like the prison and probation systems, are broken. As of December 2024, there were more than 75,000 outstanding cases awaiting trial in our crown courts, which is double the level pre-pandemic. Last year the crown court system received almost 122,000 new cases, but only managed to conclude, or ‘dispose’ of, around 114,000 cases. And so that backlog grows.
The needed changes to jury trials and the expansion of out-of-court disposals will probably be adopted
Even the 2,000 extra sitting days announced in December are not enough. Only 43 per cent of trials ‘commence as planned’. The system has been crushed by a collapse in the number of specialist lawyers and judges as a long-term consequence of the desperate underfunding of the legal aid system which began under the coalition government in 2012. It has all struggled with crumbling physical infrastructure due to a lack of funding and now faces a rising tide of crime.
The system is painfully slow, with the median crown court case taking 326 days from offence to completion, with many complex cases taking far longer. This painful slowness does great harm. As Brian Leveson said:
Our criminal justice system stands at a critical juncture. It is well recognised that justice delayed is justice denied but the record and rising court backlog means victims, witnesses and defendants are waiting months, sometimes years, for cases to come to trial – unable to move on with their lives. This situation is simply unacceptable.
So what has he recommended? The most significant change is the creation of an entirely new division of the crown court system, in which two magistrates and a district judge will determine guilt and sentence. Leveson has recommended that a large number of offences be handled in this way. They include crimes with quite significant potential sentences, including carrying a knife, causing death by careless driving or driving unlicensed, or when stealing a car, various fraud offences, incest, possession of child sexual abuse imagery, sexual assault and even violent disorder.
If accepted, this set of recommendations would mean that many defendants will never see a jury. Unfortunately, for all the ancient values and benefits of jury trials, this is probably inevitable. There isn’t the money to massively expand the court system, and even if there were, it’s not possible to buy specialist judges and barristers, who take years to train.
This change to the system would be made even more likely by the proposed changes to how guilty pleas are handled. At present, pleading guilty at the earliest possible opportunity (i.e. at a first appearance in the magistrates court) gives a 33 per cent ‘discount’ to a defendant’s sentence, with this amount reducing at each stage. Leveson has proposed a larger discount at the start, of 40 per cent, but with no guarantee of any reduction at all once a trial has begun.
This is likely to reduce the number of defendants who wait until the first day of a trial to enter a guilty plea, reducing costs and stress for victims. However, there is always the risk that this structure will interact with long waits for trial to create a perverse situation in which defendants spend less time in custody by pleading guilty than waiting for a trial and being found not guilty.
Leveson has also looked at lower-level offences. Here he recommends the increased use of ‘out of court resolutions’ (cautions, conditional cautions and other diversions away from a trial).
Perhaps more controversially, he has recommended that a number of offences be ‘reclassified’ so that they can only be dealt with in the magistrates court, meaning they would carry a maximum sentence of 12 months. These include all possession of drugs for personal use only, which is welcomed by Penelope Gibbs, director of Transform Justice, who told me that:
Sentence inflation has led to many crimes like possession of cannabis having a very high maximum sentence of up to 5 years in prison. Given that the average sentence is often less than this, this move is common sense.
Leveson’s proposals on indecent exposure, voyeurism and ‘revenge porn’ offences have, however, provoked anger, given their disproportionate impact on women and the links they often have with even more serious sexual offending. The Women’s Policy Centre told me they are:
Appalled by these proposals. Indecent exposure, voyeurism and ‘revenge porn’ are all undeniable red flags. Men who engage in such behaviour must face the full force of the law. More lenient sentencing downplays the seriousness of the abusive acts, sending a dangerous message that mistreating women is acceptable.
It is very important to note that Leveson’s proposals have not been accepted by the government and are not policy. While the Lord Chancellor has welcomed the report and indicated her desire to ‘bring down the backlog and deliver swifter justice for victims’, she has wisely indicated the government will take some months to consider the recommendations before responding in full in the autumn. I expect the needed changes to jury trials and the expansion of out-of-court disposals will be adopted, but that, if the government does accept the sentence cuts proposed, they will likely remove particular offences from the list: the Lord Chancellor’s instincts are likely sounder than Leveson’s.
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