Analysis and evaluation of adult sentencing in England and Wales

1.            Sentencing Guidelines and the Sentencing Act 2020:

The Sentencing Council for England and Wales provides guidelines to judges and magistrates to ensure consistency in sentencing.

These guidelines take into account the seriousness of the offence and the offender's culpability. This can promote fairness in sentencing. The SA 2020 was passed to help and support legal professionals in identifying and applying the law, to increase efficiency by reducing the risk of error, appeal, and delay currently within the sentencing process and to enhance the transparency of the process for the public to subsequently increase public confidence in the Criminal Justice System. The need for reform on sentencing law has been long overdue and long-requested. Prior to the Act, the law regarding sentencing was spread out over 65 different Acts of Parliament, without coherent structure or a uniform approach to drafting.

This made sentencing law challenging for advocates and tribunals, as correctly identifying and applying the relevant law was not a straightforward task. Understandably, this scattergun approach led to mistakes, delay and, most importantly, incorrect, and unjust outcomes for offenders. A study from 2017 found over a third of sentences that were considered by the Court of Appeal involved an unlawful sentence of some kind. Moreover, the Law Commission Report on the Sentencing Code revealed there was a disproportionate number of legal errors and unlawful sentences being imposed by judges. A concerning statistic from 2013 showed that 95 of 262 randomly sampled cases before the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal involved an unlawful sentence. These issues have stemmed from the overarching problem that the law was too complex. The Sentencing Act 2020 proposes to be the practical solution to this ongoing problem. The Act is purported to be able to save £256 million by 2030 by reducing delays that clog up the court system, and by avoiding unnecessary appeals by helping all parties in identifying and applying the correct law first time. The Act will tackle the complexity of the law in two ways, namely: Firstly, Improved Accessibility: The new Act has been drafted with clarity and transparency in mind, and in consequence includes modernised language in place of outdated terminology and gender-neutral terms which increases relevancy to 21st century users and secondly; Improved Efficiency: The unnecessary layers of historic legislation are removed leaving a new clearer framework of sentencing law. The Act’s sensible layout makes sentencing provisions easier to navigate and reduce both errors and the appeals to correct them. The Act makes it much simpler for a sentencing judge to locate and apply their sentencing powers and duties making their role more straightforward. Together, these improvements will have the integral effect of increasing public confidence. Not only will people be able to see improvement in the number of errors and delays at the sentencing stage, but non-lawyers will also be able to better understand the sentencing process.

Many things are not changing though: the maximum sentences for offences, the tests applied in passing any sentence, the sentencing…