LIFE AFTER DEATH
The official (i.e. Government) response to provide a statutory sentence of life imprisonment in place of the death penalty was not slow in coming. After the affirmative motion in December 1969 to extend the life of the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965, the Home Secretary (Mr James Callaghan) gave the Criminal Law Revision Committee (CLRC, a body exclusively composed of judges and lawyers) the task of reviewing all offences against the person; the terms of reference specifically said that the review should include homicide in the light of, and subject to, ‘the recent decision of Parliament to make permanent the statutory provisions abolishing the death penalty for murder’.
In an interim report in 1973 the Committee concluded that the mandatory sentence should be left undisturbed. There was a powerful dissent from the doyen of academic criminal lawyers, Professor Glanville Williams, who neatly set out the rival arguments. When it came to its Fourteenth Report on Offences Against the Person in March 1980, the CLRC (never formally abolished thereafter) had shifted its stance. Almost evenly divided, the Committee made no recommendation. Thereafter for 20 more years almost all official and unofficial reports (of which there were many) opted in favour of abolition of the mandatory sentence. The most compelling voice for the removal of the mandatory element was Lord Bingham, then the Lord Chief Justice. His lecture to the Police Staff College in March 1998 is reproduced in The Business of Judging.[116] It was unhappily ignored by the Labour administration (through the Home Secretary, Mr David Blunkett), which promoted the relevant provision of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Significantly, because at the time - February 1978[117] - it was unpublished, the Law Commission, responding to a restricted questionnaire from the Criminal Law Revision Committee, issued a memorandum on the question of offences against the person which strongly favoured the abolition of the mandatory life sentence. The rest was statutory silence, even when the subject was raised by leading politicians in the Conservative and Labour administrations. The 2003 Act was an aspect of the rhetorical statement of ‘tough on crime, tough on the criminal’ - interpreted by the Prime Minister as being rationally applied.The sole conversation on the topic of what has become known as ‘whole-life’ crept into public awareness when the Home Secretary (Mr Leon Brittan) announced a series of changes that brought sole control over decision-making on the length of time to be served to the Home Office, even to the extent that not even the Lord Chief Justice was notified of changes (normally an increase on a judicially recommended minimum term). By 1994 another Home Secretary, Michael (now Lord) Howard, said that he intended to impose ‘whole-life’ tariffs (which he invented) on some 20 notorious killers (the number of prisoners serving ‘whole-life’ sentences is now in excess of 50) and in 1995, in a letter to the Home Affairs Committee, reminded members of what Leon Brittan had said in 1983, and spelt out future statements as to what it meant. The review after 25 years, which those who had been marked out for whole-life terms had enjoyed, was administratively taken away by Michael Howard, a move endorsed in the legislation of 2003.