Mitigation a major factor in sentencing

Personal mitigation plays an important part in sentencing decisions and can be the decisive factor in choosing a community penalty in preference to imprisonment, a new study shows.

Mitigation: The Role of Personal Factors in Sentencing, carried out by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, King’s College London and the Prison Reform Trust, charts the range of personal and social factors that judges take into account in passing sentence.

In almost half the 162 cases observed in the study, judges cited at least some factor of personal mitigation as relevant to sentencing.
In around a third of the 127 cases where the judge made the role of mitigation explicit, personal mitigation was usually the major factor which pulled the sentence back from immediate custody.

In about a quarter of these cases, mitigation including personal factors resulted in a shorter custodial sentence.

Professor Mike Hough, of King’s College London, says: “Sentencing is often about balancing offender and offence-related factors. If justice is to be achieved, sentencing has to be tailored to the individual. Mitigation needs to be recognised more fully as an important element of the sentencing process.”