By Monidipa Fouzder2021-05-19T11:27:00+01:00
Pre-sentence reports are being piloted at 15 magistrates’ courts as part of the government s pledge to adopt a smarter approach to sentencing.
The reports help judges and magistrates assess the risk posed by an offender, the factors underlying their offending and the strengths they can draw on to move away from crime when they are considering imposing a community or custodial sentence. However, the number of pre-sentence reports has fallen from 156,659 in 2009 to 75,900 in 2019 – a 52% drop.
Lord chancellor Robert Buckland announced in his
A Smarter Approach to Sentencing white paper that he would test new ways to deliver pre-sentence reports in the magistrates’ courts as part of a
The low down
The ‘can do’ attitude lawyers and the justice system assumed when Covid-19 struck has seen the overnight arrival of technologies that have been talked about for years. The criminal justice system has experienced a dramatic increase in the use of remote hearings and solicitors attending police station interviews virtually. While it is unlikely that things will go back to how they were in 2019, decades of underspending on criminal justice is leaving defence lawyers fearful that cost and convenience and not the interests of clients will determine which changes are permanent. Not least, the ability for a defence lawyer to read the room – an important factor in criminal proceedings – could be lost.
By John Hyde2021-05-05T10:20:00+01:00
Court staff paid as little as £17,000 a year are increasingly leaving their jobs just as the service needs more people to solve its backlog crisis.
Unions representing court workers say it is completely unacceptable that the Ministry of Justice continues to be one of the lowest-paying civil service departments. The head of HM Courts & Tribunals Service has admitted the government needs to address the fact that court workers are paid around £3,000 less than people with equivalent roles in other civil service departments.
A freedom of information request by the
Gazette has revealed that HMCTS staff in the lowest band of the seven band are paid on average £17,549, rising to £20,547 for the next level. Salaries are less for court ushers, who in the lowest band are paid £17,083 on average outside London (the figure rises to £18,777 for those working in the London region). By way of comparison, the average starting salary for case worker
By Jemma Slingo2021-05-04T10:07:00+01:00
Remote hearings deliver a ‘markedly inferior experience’ and degrade human interaction, professional bodies across the British Isles have said.
In a joint statement, the Bar Councils of England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland, together with Scotland’s Faculty of Advocates, said that virtual hearings have ‘multiple and multi-faceted disadvantages’ compared with in-person proceedings.
‘Experience shows that judicial interaction is different and less satisfactory in remote hearings from that experienced in “real life” with the result that hearings can be less effective at isolating issues and allowing argument to be developed,’ the professional bodies said.