Shabana Mahmood’s intervention to halt new guidelines on sentencing is “dangerous” and a “deliberate step backwards”, according to senior legal figures and prison campaigners.
The Society of Black Lawyers said guidelines from the Sentencing Council, which were suspended after an intervention by the justice secretary, were an attempt to achieve “equal treatment” after “racist two-tier policing for 500 years”.
Pavan Dhaliwal, the head of the charity Revolving Doors, said the lord chancellor’s decision to block recommendations for pre-sentencing reports for minorities “is to ignore lived experience, evidence, and the reality of disparity in our courts”.
The Sentencing Council on Monday suspended plans for the guidelines in England and Wales, which highlighted the need for pre-sentencing reports depending on age, sex and ethnicity, as ministers prepared to force through a law to overturn proposals.
Mahmood told MPs that the council would have its role reviewed in light of the row over the guidelines.
The climbdown, which took place hours before the guidance was due to come into force, followed a standoff with the Ministry of Justice, which planned to use emergency legislation to override the guidelines.
The guidelines, first drawn up under the Conservative government, were viewed as evidence of a “two-tier” justice system by the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick.
Peter Herbert, the chair of the Society of Black Lawyers, said: “We have experienced racist two-tier policing for over 500 years. If we achieve equal treatment that is not two-tier as it is long overdue. We have never asked for special treatment only equal treatment.”
Dhaliwal said: “The lord chancellor’s decision to block the Sentencing Council’s guidance is a deliberate step backwards and the claim that recognising race and inequality in sentencing undermines fairness is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.
“To suggest that acknowledging these facts undermines equality is to ignore lived experience, evidence, and the reality of disparity in our courts. Pre-sentence reports are one of the few tools we have to challenge those disparities by giving courts the full context: poverty, trauma, racial discrimination.”
Black and minority ethnic communities are overrepresented at almost all stages of the criminal justice process in England and Wales and are more likely to be imprisoned and receive longer sentences than white people.
The council, composed of some of the most senior legal figures in England and Wales, said the guidelines would have helped address disparities between how different ethnicities are treated in the justice system.
The new rules, which would have been binding on judges, were set to take effect on Tuesday but were delayed on Monday because of the inevitability they would be overturned by parliament.
The new rules stated: “When considering a community or custodial sentence, the court must request and consider a pre-sentence report (PSR) before forming an opinion of the sentence, unless it considers that it is unnecessary.”
“A pre-sentence report will normally be considered necessary if the offender belongs to one (or more) of the following cohorts:
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At risk of first custodial sentence and/or at risk of a custodial sentence of 2 years or less (after taking into account any reduction for guilty plea).
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A young adult (typically 18-25 years.
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Female.
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From an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community.
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Pregnant or postnatal.
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Sole or primary carer for dependent relatives.”
The leading black KC Keir Monteith said there had been a deliberate misreading of the rules to generate a row.
“This is an absurd situation where we have politicians on both sides of the house creating an argument out of absolutely nothing. It is not ‘two-tier’ justice because the starting point of the dropped guidelines was everyone should get a pre-sentencing report.
“This story that has been created by Robert Jenrick and then taken up by Mahmood and seems to coincide with all the noise we are getting from America about two-tier justice,” he said.
In an article for the Guardian, Janey Starling, the co-director of gender justice campaign group Level Up, accused Mahmood of participating in “a populist pantomime” with Jenrick.
“What is truly appalling is that Mahmood decided to play along in an attempt to win over Conservative and Reform UK voters,” she said.
In a statement to the Commons, Mahmood said: “The proper role of the Sentencing Council and the process for making guidelines of this type must be considered further.
“I will do so in the coming months. It is right that this question is considered in greater depth and should further legislation be required, I shall propose it as part of the upcoming sentencing bill.”
The Labour MP Diane Abbott has said some MPs are “astonished” at Mahmood’s response to the council’s dropped guidelines. “I realise this is not a popular view in the house but the justice secretary will be aware that some of us are astonished that she thinks our judges are so weak-minded as to be affected by what are guidelines in relation to how they sentence black and brown defendants,” she said.
Source: theguardian.com
