If criminals won’t come to the dock, they should be made to face their sentencing

Is that all? This was my thought on hearing the Government’s proposals, announced last week, for the additional punishment of convicted criminals who refuse to come to the dock to attend their sentencing. Such behaviour is the final insult to the families of victims present as the judge reveals the sentence to be passed, and justifies it in the context of the depravity of the crime committed, addressing his remarks to the person in the dock. Who seems entirely at liberty not to appear. So last Wednesday the Ministry of Justice finally set out four sanctions to be made available to judges when their court has been treated so contemptuously. The prisoner may be subjected to solitary confinement for up to three weeks; they could be excluded from certain “privileges” for up to three months; they could lose “visiting rights” for 27 days – but this would not apply to children who wished to see their parent in prison; and the prisoner could have other social visits limited to once every four weeks for the first 84 days of their incarceration. The government press release described these as “tough new prison punishments”. Claire Waxman, the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, hailed them as the appropriate response to “the tireless efforts of victims’ families who refused to accept that offenders could simply opt out of facing justice”. In reality, these “new punishments” are not “tough” at all; and I was struck that the Government seemed unable to find any actual relatives of the victims of some of the vilest offences to say how grateful they were. Others are welcome to claim precedence, but I believe I was the first to write articles pointing out an increasing tendency for those committing the foulest crimes to refuse to attend sentencing, and that this required deterrence. This was five years ago, when Emma Tustin refused to attend her sentencing for the murder of her six-year-old stepson Arthur Labinjo-Hughes (he had been subjected to repeated assaults, food deprivation, and salt poisoning, before she finally finished him off with a catastrophic head injury). I wrote then: “As if to emphasise her absolute lack of contrition for the murder of her stepson, Emma Tustin refused to leave the cells to attend court for her sentencing. It was also a final act of spite, in denying the poor boy’s grandparents the bleak satisfaction of seeing her in the dock as a convict while the judge set out her punishment (a minimum term of 29 years).” I then noted how the previous month another child killer (Chun Xu) had refused to attend sentencing for his strangling to death a 16-year-old girl in the Welsh town of Ynyswen. The judge, when sentencing Xu for a minimum of 30 years, told the court he would “address Xu as though he were in the dock”. What a farce. My concern was that the absence of any condign response by the courts encouraged others of the most arrogant criminals to behave likewise. Sure enough that has happened, noticeably when a year later Jordan McSweeney refused to attend sentencing for the indescribably violent murder of a complete stranger, Zara Aleena. In that case, the judge declared: “For the defendant not to come up from the cells to hear the devastating impact of his crimes shows the man who took Zara Aleena’s life has no spine whatever.” A pointless rebuke. More notoriously still, in 2023 Lucy Letby refused to attend her sentencing (to a full life term) for the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of seven more. Rishi Sunak, then the PM, declared it was “cowardly that people who commit such horrendous crimes do not face their victims”, and the then leader of the opposition, one Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, said his party would, if elected to government, close this “shamefully exploited loophole”. They have not done so, whatever claims they make for last week’s “tough new punishments”. The point is that for someone facing an extraordinarily long sentence (or a full life term, in Letby’s case), such trivial additional penalties are no sort of deterrent at all. Why should they not be made to attend sentencing? Our prison officers are allowed to use “reasonable force”. A similar statute applies in France (“amené par la force”). But in both countries, prison officers don’t appear happy to do this; and judges fear that if a recalcitrant offender is brought up to the cells in such a manner, he or she will start shouting and screaming insults, adding to the distress of victims’ family members. The most creative suggestion came from the former Conservative Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, in the wake of the Letby case: it should have been possible to play the sentencing remarks into her cell. I’d add that it should also have been possible for a camera to have been placed in the cell, so that parents of the murdered babies could see her at the same time. Yet neither this Government (nor the previous one), has shown any interest in this eminently practical solution. Why not?