Weak UK Judges Let 40 Per Cent of Repeat Knife Crime Offenders Avoid Jail

Police attend the scene of a stabbing on London Road, near the junction of Oakfield Road,
Dominic Lipinski/PA Images via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Britain’s notoriously lax judicial system has reportedly seen nearly 40 per cent of repeat knife crime offenders spared from prison terms over the past year despite the government implementing a “two-strike” sentencing rule meant to deter them.

The proportion of repeat knife crime offenders being allowed to walk free by judges has reached the highest level since the government introduced legislation in 2015 which supposedly mandated that second offenders receive automatic prison terms.

According to Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures seen by The Telegraph, 1,537 out of 3,886 multiple offenders were not given prison sentences by the courts in the year leading up to March, representing nearly 40 per cent of all cases — up from 27.9 per cent in 2019/20 and 34.2 per cent last year.

One instance highlighted by the paper saw a 31-year-old man merely receive a two-year suspended sentence — meaning no time behind bars without further offending within a certain time frame, and maybe not even then — after he stabbed a motorcyclist in the chest in a mistaken identity revenge attack.

Another man received a six-month probation period from a judge after threatening a shopkeeper with a large kitchen knife. The attacker had a long history of offences, being convicted 50 times for 135 different crimes, including four instances of using a bladed weapon.

Responding to the dismal figures, the chair of the Common Sense group of Conservative MPs, Sir John Hayes, told the broadsheet that courts could no longer be counted upon to come to the “appropriate” decision on their own and that Parliament should legislate for longer sentencing requirements.

“We need to lock up more violent people for longer,” Sir John said. “The principle of justice has been neglected in favour of a treatmentship approach that sees all crime as a result of a personal or social ill. It is people who live on the frontline of crime that suffer when courts fail to lock people up.”

While the MoJ suggested that the low prison sentencing may have come as a result of the lockdown, suggesting that the stressed judicial system had attempted to focus on supposedly more serious crimes, the director of the Police Foundation, Rick Muir, posited that judges become more lenient when there is less political focus on crime.

“Sometimes you get a real focus on an issue like when you have an increase of crime and you get harsher sentencing as a deterrent,” he said. “It may be that when the focus is shifted a bit, they feel a bit less pressured.”

The revelations come amid an increase in knife crime overall. It rose by 10 per cent over the previous year to 49,027 offences in the year leading up to March. Approximately 40 per cent of murders during the same time period were committed with knives or other sharp weapons.

While convicted murderers are subject to “life” sentences in the United Kingdom, in reality, the average time actually spent in prison on a life sentence for murder is just is just 16.6 years, with “life” only meaning “life on parole” for most offenders.

Further demonstrating the laxity of the British judiciary, some killers have been set free serving as little as 3.6 years behind bars.

Law and order has been garnering more attention of late due to the crime wave sweeping the nation, with several high-profile murders shocking the country, including the shooting of a 9-year-old girl in Liverpool and the stabbing of an 87-year-old man on a mobility scooter in London.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.