Following the Court of Appeal handing down judgment yesterday in the appeals against sentence by the killers of Pc Andrew Harper, and the Attorney General’s application to refer the sentences as unduly lenient, I posted the below thread, looking at what the judgment means.
I understand if it’s an unfeasible amount of work for you to post these as normal pieces of text – but I don’t think posts are readable in this form. Is there something else you can try? As far as I can see, the small text in the images is illegible (when the images are magnified, the text is completely blurry).
Fabulous blog, very informative for laypeople with an interest in law, and must take a huge amount of time to write in addition to your heavy barrister’s workload. Well done! However it is nearly impossible for me (and maybe others?) to read the tweets you have uploaded on this case because they are too small on my laptop screen and if I try and increase the font size of course they then get blurry anyway.
A pity. I’d be happy to wait a few more days to be able to read a transcript or one of your excellent articles in full font size rather than struggle with reproduced tweets.. Something to think about please? And also, I don’t have a website, which makes filling in your ‘required details’ to post a comment difficult. Why is a URL necessary to post a comment?
Thank you for highlighting the AG’s clumsy and obvious political interference in something that is a matter of law. It’s particularly reassuring to see the Court of Appeal giving short shrift to a politician using alleged public concern as a means to score political points in the Daily Mail and Sun at the expense of people who have close to zero public sympathy. I thought that, in a democracy, political representatives were supposed to stand up for those who can’t speak for themselves.
There are a number of points I might make about this case.
The obvious one being that we have a very young man facing a long jail term yet nobody asks why he ended up in the situation he did.
The Secret Barrister points out that about 6% of the population end up in court on criminal charges, rising to about 66% of boys who have a father with a criminal record.
I find it hard to imagine that it is in a childs interest to be at such a high risk of involvement in crime, while I dont imagine that PC Harpers death could have been predicted what could have been predicted was that at birth there was a very high chance of him ending up in jail.
Not only that but he was able to drop out of education at about 12 with no action being taken despite the risks he was exposed to.
May I suggest that we need to be looking very carefully about what should be happening to the children of offenders to prevent them becoming involved in crime?
The other point I might make is that given the high risk of the defendant returning to a life of crime, given the support and supervision that he would get on release as a life sentence prisoner, there may be an argument that a life sentence could have been in his best interest, and of course Society’s?