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I can't see any home secretary allowing, for example, Ian Brady or Ian Huntley out, can you? Harry Roberts has served longer than most who commit the same crime as him...


You are still missing the point.

The European Courts have taken away from Politicians the authority to interfere in the sentence set by the courts.

The days of a Judge setting an 8 year sentence (as in the Bulgar case) and the Home Secretary coming along and arbitrarily increasing it to 15 years are over.

This is where this debate started

Ian Brady and Ian Huntley are serving Whole Life terms (imposed by the courts). The issue of the Home Secretary allowing or disallowing something in those cases is irrelevant.

In July 2009, the parole board determined that Roberts still posed a risk to the public and should continue to serve time.

The Justice Secretary retains the power to reject a parole board recommendation that a prisoner moved to an open prison.

However the Justice Secretary can not block a decision by a parole board to order the release of a prisoner serving life term at the end of the recommended minimum sentence.

spider's overall argument is correct, although he erred on a matter of fact when he said that the "days of a Judge setting an 8 year sentence and the Home Secretary coming along and arbitrarily increasing it to 15 years are over". What he should have said is not that the days of the Home Secretary increasing a SENTENCE are over - as the Home Secretary didn't have any such power in the first place - but that the days of the Home Secretary increasing a MINIMUM TARIFF to be served of a life sentence are over.

PS. Ian Huntley is not serving a whole life term but a life sentence with a minimum tariff of 40 years.

In The Mail on Sunday today Peter Hitchens writes a piece about how the abolition of double jeopardy has the potential to harm us all.

"I am sure that both these men have done bad things. It may be that they are guilty of this awful murder, but I fear that their guilt is not proven beyond reasonable doubt. And I am revolted by the fact that the authorities were so shamefully negligent that Norris was severely beaten up by other prisoners while on remand.

If we set out to achieve justice ? and I will come back to that ? then we must be sure that justice is what we actually get. A show trial in which justice seems to have been done, and hasn?t been, actually makes all our lives worse. If these are the wrong culprits, locked up to make us feel good about ourselves, then we have responded to evil with evil.

Much worse for me, a British patriot intensely proud of our centuries-long struggle for freedom under the law, this whole prosecution is a violation of our heritage.

The rule against trying anyone twice for the same crime is essential for liberty. And it is absolute. It must apply even when it makes us weep or vomit to obey it. The rule of law is only any use if it stops us doing things we would really, really like to do. If laws can be overridden by convenience, desire or because of effective campaigning, they are not laws.

Remember Thomas More?s great defence of law in Robert Bolt?s wonderful drama A Man For All Seasons. More?s accuser says he would ?cut down every law in England? to go after the devil. More retorts: ?Oh, and when the last law was down, and the devil turned on you, where would you hide, all the laws being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man?s laws not God?s, and if you cut them down ? and you?re just the man to do it ? do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then??

Then he says quietly: ?Yes, I?d give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety?s sake.?

'We too must give the devil ? and the devil?s friends, Norris and Dobson ? the benefit of law, for our own safety?s sake.

'I am sure of this because I have been to many of the worst places in the world, and the thing they all have in common is that there is no rule of law. They may pretend to have democracy (easy to do; our own democracy is increasingly a pretence). They may claim to have ?human rights?. But with no rule of law, nobody is safe, ever.

Now, the campaign to get justice for Stephen Lawrence and his bereaved, dignified family has been a noble one. When our sister newspaper, the Daily Mail, bravely accused a group of low-life crooks of being his murderers on its front page and dared them to sue, I rejoiced.

This was a good and courageous use of the power of a free press, one that my trade can always be proud of.

It also blew into fragments a smug slander, ceaselessly directed at conservative popular newspapers by ignorant and malicious media Leftists. They sneered from their state-subsidised desks that we were ?fascists? ? racial bigots who believed in repression of free debate.

After that front page, this libel simply could not be advanced any more by any thinking or informed person. Better still, it was clear that what really motivated conservative popular journalism was a thirst for justice. But at that stage, thanks to the 1996 failed private prosecution of several of the alleged killers, that was as far as it went. The courts had failed. The guilty must therefore be marked as what they were and shamed.

Others, with quite different aims, then sought to use the case for their own ends. They wanted a politically correct inquisition into the police, already weakened by Left- liberal attacks in the Eighties but still a deeply conservative institution.

And the Blair Government, which despised British liberties, saw an opportunity to smash the ancient double jeopardy rule.

The Macpherson report, a bizarre document that few of its fans have ever read, never found any actual evidence of racial bigotry in the police. That is why it had to dredge up the old Sixties revolutionary slogan of ?institutional racism?. This is a presumption of guilt that has been used ever afterwards to enforce political correctness in the police force.

Thanks to this case, and what followed, have racial killings ceased? On the contrary, they are more common. Are murders and other crimes investigated more thoroughly? Hardly.

This country contains many families, as deeply wounded as the Lawrences, whose losses have also gone unavenged by justice, and who have no hope."

It should be noted that the threshold for a retrial after an aquittal is huge. Both the DPP and the Court of Appeal must agree that the evidence is new and compelling, that the prosecution is in the public interest and in the interest of justice. It's not easy for the prosection to get a second trial, although the advanced nature of forensic technology now means that they are always in with a chance of finding the kind of new evidence that is necessary.

A significant case was that of William Dunlop, who admitted in 1999 that he had committed a murder (of Julie Hogg in 1989). As he had been acquitted in 1991 nothing could be done about his confession, but after the abolition of the double jeopardy rule Dunlop was retried and convicted of murder. Dunlop had said in 1999 that "I committed murder and I can boast about it and there's nothing that anyone can do about it".

Not much there I can disagree with.