The meaning of life

Last month, the Court of Appeal considered the issue of whole life tariffs, which in three separate cases heard together were appealed on the basis that whole life orders were incompatible with Art 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment.

Although the panel, comprising the Lord Chief Justice and four appellate judges, overturned the whole life tariff for murderer Danilo Restivo and rapists Michael Roberts and David Simmons, they upheld the sentence for killer David Oakes. Their ruling, which comes just prior to the appeal by Jeremy Bamber and two other murderers to overturn their whole life tariffs at the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, sends a signal to the Strasbourg that the courts in England and Wales are content that power to jail someone forever is, in some instances, justified.

Lord Judge stated that it was open to the individual state to make statutory provision for the imposition of a whole life minimum term and, if appropriate, as a matter of judicial discretion, for the court to make such an order; it was not for the European Court to intervene. In the UK, Parliament has legislated to enable judges to impose whole life sentences without the possibility of release, which for would be appropriate where punishment and retribution required detention for life in the literal sense.

So who do whole life tariffs apply to? They are, and should remain the court held, reserved for the few exceptionally serious offences committed by offenders judged to be the most dangerous to society. Currently 46 offenders are subject to whole life orders. Unlike other life term prisoners, they are not eligible for release on licence if, after their minimum term, they can prove that they are no longer a risk to society...

Rightly or wrongly, such offenders can wind up languishing in prison with no hope of ever being able to demonstrate that they are no longer a danger to society: life really meaning life…”

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