By Andrew MacAskill
LONDON (Reuters) – The Sentencing Council for England and Wales, which provides guidelines to judges on punishments, suspended on Monday plans that could have led to a reduced chance for some criminals of being sent to prison depending on their ethnicity, age or sex.
The independent body announced it was delaying the plans hours before the changes were due to come into effect after the government threatened to introduce legislation that would overturn the guidelines.
The proposed guidelines would have advised judges to produce a pre-sentence report, which provides background information on the offender, for specific groups such as ethnic, cultural and religious minorities and for transgender individuals, women and young offenders.
There would have been no requirements for similar pre-sentence background reports for other groups.
Some politicians claimed the plan would have introduced a “two-tier” justice system, while the Sentencing Council said the plans were needed to fix the “disparities in sentencing outcomes” given to different groups.
The justice minister Shabana Mahmood told the chairman of the Sentencing Council at a meeting on Monday that the government planned to introduce the legislation to overturn the plan, the body said.
“The chairman indicated that the council would not introduce a guideline when there is a draft bill due for imminent introduction that would make it unlawful,” the Sentencing Council said in a statement.
In 2018, the government said that Black criminals were, on average, given sentences nearly twice as long as white offenders for violent attacks.
Mahmood said in statement the changes proposed by the council could have undermined public confidence in the criminal justice system.
“This differential treatment is unacceptable,” she said.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer was labelled “two-tier Keir” by some politicians last summer after claims during widespread rioting that there is a policy in Britain where some ethnic groups were policed more leniently than others.
This followed a politically charged debate over the limits of free speech after some white Britons were jailed for posting information viewed as incendiary even though they did not take part directly in the riots.
(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill; Editing by Leslie Adler)
