Where there has been a long interval between crime and punishment, are we punishing the “person” who committed the crime?
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
10M ago
Derek Parfit’s name is not widely known even though he was probably the most important moral philosopher of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a quintessential academic philosopher, he never sought the limelight and seldom gave interviews or engaged in public debate. However, he is in the news now, six years after his death, because of a major new biography of him by David Edmonds, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality (Princeton, 2023), recently reviewed by Stephen Mulhall in the London Review of Books. Parfit’s life is in some respects as interesting as his w ..read more
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Prison overcrowding is a relevant sentencing factor
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
10M ago
Academics nowadays must pay careful attention to the impact of their published work, though “impact” is narrowly and rather strangely defined, for some purposes at least, as the number of times an article is cited by other articles. What brings this to mind is that I recently flunked the impact test in a big way, albeit in a political context. A few weeks ago, I gave a public lecture here at University of Galway where I argued, among other things, that sentencing should not only be consistent and proportionate, but moderate as well. (I am reliably informed that the lecture in question can be s ..read more
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Are guilty pleas the answer?
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
10M ago
Should we encourage more and earlier guilty pleas in order to address overcrowded criminal court lists and the consequent delays in processing criminal cases? Embedded in this question are several moral and practical issues that I will try to tease out in this post. The question itself comes to mind as a result of a recent RTE Prime Time programme on delay in the criminal justice system. The Minister for Justice, who appeared on the programme, was obviously pinning his hopes on the appointment of additional judges, with more than 40 promised between now and the end of next year. The Courts Act ..read more
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Taking offences into consideration (again).
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
1y ago
The recent judgment of the Court of Appeal in Coyle and Howard [2022] IECA 114 addresses some important sentencing issues but it is more noteworthy for one point it omits to address. This relates to taking offences into consideration. Each appellant had pleaded guilty to one count of violent disorder and one count of assault causing harm. Coyle was sentenced to an effective term of 5.5 years’ imprisonment (7.5 years with the last 2 years suspended for violent disorder and a concurrent 4-year term for the assault). The judgment records that the trial judge took into consideration five further c ..read more
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Two great lawyers with West of Ireland roots: inspiring tales for the examination season
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
1y ago
About a year ago, to mark the centenary of the NUI Galway Law Society, I wrote about some distinguished nineteenth and early twentieth century lawyers with NUIG or West of Ireland connections. Now that the students have completed their examinations (in person for the first time in ages) and are awaiting their results, it is worth considering how poorly examination performance can reflect a person’s real ability. Formal examinations certainly suit some, and high grades are often, not necessarily always, a prelude to significant achievements in later life. But, more importantly, many students wh ..read more
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An early Irish plea for sentencing guidelines
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
1y ago
Many of us, if asked when an Irish superior court was first invited to develop sentencing guidance for a particular offence, would probably say that it happened in 1988 when counsel for the Attorney General in People (DPP) v Tiernan [1988] I.R. 250 requested the Supreme Court to consider indicating sentence starting points for rape offences. The court declined to do so on that occasion. Recently, however, when researching some early decisions of the Court of the Criminal Appeal, using the Irish Times archive, I noticed that a rather similar request had been made more than 60 years earlier in A ..read more
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The Attica Prison riot 50 years on, and how it may have changed our thinking about sentencing
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
1y ago
On 9 September 1971, a riot erupted in Attica Prison in Wyoming County, New York. About half of the 2,200 inmates participated, taking control of the prison and holding more than 40 guards hostage. They presented the authorities with a list of demands, mainly for better living conditions. The demands were well justified. As Adam Gopnik wrote in a great piece some years ago: “Attica was a hellhole, The largest industry in a forsaken and impoverished upstate town, it was a place where urban blacks were locked up in bathroom-sized cells to be guarded by rural whites. Although Attica was a high se ..read more
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A New Scottish Sentencing Guideline – The Sentencing Process
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
1y ago
Most of us by now have some familiarity with the Guidelines produced by the English Sentencing Council and its predecessor, the Sentencing Guidelines Council. They can be remarkably useful elsewhere, including in this jurisdiction, for the purposes of identifying the factors to be considered when assessing the gravity of particular offences and establishing penalty ranges. Obviously, the specific sentence starting points and ranges they recommend are of little use elsewhere, if only because most prisoners in England and Wales serve no more than half of the terms actually imposed (though the st ..read more
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Popular culture in the English Court of Appeal
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
1y ago
There’s nought wrong with popular culture, as they might say in Coronation Street. Consider, for example, how influential it proved to be in Chipunza [2021] EWCA Crim. 597 where the question was whether a hotel bedroom was a dwelling for the purpose of sentencing for burglary. Under the English Theft Act 1968 (s. 9), as originally enacted, there was a single offence of burglary which consisted of entering a building or part of a building as a trespasser with the intention of committing one of certain specified offences. Alternatively it could consist of committing one of a number of specified ..read more
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Offences created by statutory instrument – should ignorance of the law be an excuse or, at least, afford mitigation?
Sentencing, Crime and Justice
by Tom
1y ago
In one of his great constitutional judgments, King v Attorney General [1981] I.R. 233, Mr Justice Henchy referred (p. 257) to “the basic concept inherent in our legal system that a man may walk abroad in the secure knowledge that he will not be singled out from his fellow-citizens and branded and punished as a criminal unless it has been established beyond reasonable doubt that he has deviated from a clearly prescribed standard of conduct.” In that case, part of an early nineteenth century vagrancy statute was found to be inconsistent with the Constitution on a number of grounds including, in ..read more
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