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- In a landmark case, the Court considers that sentencers should take account of widespread overcrowding and harsher detention conditions as a factor in favour of suspending sentences.
07 March 2023
Crime & Fraud Cases
In a landmark case, the Court considers that sentencers should take account of widespread overcrowding and harsher detention conditions as a factor in favour of suspending sentences.
07 March 2023
| Crime & Fraud Cases
Leila Abdul Rasool of the Crime team
acted on behalf of
- a client, AA, in a landmark case, where the Court of Appeal considered that sentencers should take into account prison overcrowding and harsher detention conditions as factors to in favour of suspending sentences.
- Her client was originally charged with ABH of a prisoner officer, whilst an inmate at HMP Maidstone in 2019. There was a delay in charging him, by which time he was no longer a prisoner and had already been punished internally by being placed in isolation for 29 days.
- Representations were made to the CPS that he had been punished already and to prosecute him was not in the public interest. The Crown wished to proceed regardless and by the time the matter was listed for trial some years after the alleged assault, he had completed his licence term on the original matter that he was serving a sentence for and complied with the terms of the licence without fault.
- Ultimately, the Crown were persuaded to take a plea to the lesser offence of assaulting an emergency worker and on 6 February 2023, AA received a sentence of 6 months’ immediate imprisonment. AA appealed against the immediate sentence on the grounds that it was both manifestly excessive and wrong in principle. The Registrar referred the application for leave to the Full Court. On 3 March 2023, the Court (Edis LJ; Bryan J; HHJ Dhir KC) granted leave and, having heard submissions, allowed the appeal, quashing the immediate custodial sentence and replacing it with a suspended sentence order. Jordan Santos Sindes of 9 Bedford Row was counsel instructed for trial and to conduct the appeal.
- When giving judgment, Edis LJ echoed the Lord Chief Justice’s guidance in R v Manning [2020] EWCA Crim 592; [2020] 4 WLR 77 holding that there was “a further exceptional factor” in AA’s case since he “was sentenced at a time of very high prison population”. The Court referred to the Government’s announcement of Operation Safeguard in November 2022 in which 400 police cells would be “repurposed” as longer-term holding facilities to ease the pressure on the prison service (§§18-22). Edis LJ quoted from a letter which the Deputy Prime Minister wrote to the Lord Chief Justice on 24 February 2023 which accepted inter alia that detention would be harsher than before on account of high occupancy levels, reduced access to rehabilitation programmes and the possibility of prisoners being detained further away from home.
- Giving general guidance (§22), the Court held that the additional factor “will principally apply to shorter sentences because a significant proportion of such sentences is likely to be served during the time when the prison population is very high. It will only apply to sentences passed during this time. We have identified above the starting point for the relevance of this consideration for sentencing, which we take to be the implementation of Operation Safeguard 14 days after 6 February 2023. Sentencing courts will now have an awareness of the impact of the current prison population levels from the material quoted in this judgment and can properly rely on that. It will be a matter for government to communicate to the courts when prison."
- Therefore, those persons with a realistic prospect of sentence suspension can properly rely on the current overcrowding as an additional factor which militates in favour of suspension. They need only reference R v Ali [2023] EWCA Crim 232.
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