Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2019
There is an awful lot of misunderstanding in the debate about whether judges in Scotland can hand down a life sentence. It is very disappointing to see such errors creep into Mr Johnson’s intervention and the Scottish National Party amendment to the motion, so let us take some time to understand the reality. When a judge in Scotland hands down a so-called life sentence, it is made up of a minimum period that the offender must spend in custody before being eligible for parole—the punishment part—and, after that, the possibility of further time, if the Parole Board so decides. The court has no power to mandate that the worst criminals will never get out.
We are told that the Scottish courts already have a power to set a punishment part that is longer than the rest of an offender’s life. That is the case if the criminal happens to be elderly or terminally unwell, but it turns on chance and cannot be designed.
Daniel Johnson also misses the point that judges are bound by case law, which says that the murderer of a child or a police officer should receive a punishment part of only 20 years. That is not a lifetime. The longest punishment part that has ever been handed out by a Scottish court is 37 years, and even that most extreme example is not the rest of someone’s life if they are in their 20s. The incontestable fact is that Scottish courts cannot, by law, guarantee that the worst criminals will not be let back on to our streets.
Before I get the inevitable intervention, I say that it is a persistent myth that whole-life custody sentences are contrary to human rights. That is not true. In January 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that whole-life orders as they exist in England and Wales are not in breach of the European convention on human rights.