The defendants appealed against their sentences of six years for importation of Class A drugs, saying that the recent proposals for sentencing from the Sentencing advisory Panel would make six years excessive.
Held: The proposals for guidance were of interest, but were not formal guidance and the court could not be bound by them.
Lord Judge LCJ said: ‘This summary of the relevant authorities seems to us to indicate a very clear principle. The proposals of the Sentencing Advisory Panel are proposals only. As we have shown, they form part of a public consultation process. At the conclusion of the consultation process, they may or may not be amended. Thereafter, the proposals would have fallen to be considered by the Sentencing Guidelines Council, and will now be considered by the new Sentencing Council. At that stage the Sentencing Council will decide whether or not to issue a definitive guideline, and, if so, the form such guidance should take. Until there is a definitive guideline issued by the Sentencing Council, although the proposals of the Sentencing Advisory Panel are of considerable interest as part of the background which sentencing judges may wish to bear in mind, the proposals themselves do not constitute guidance to sentencers which serve to displace, or amend or in any way undermine the authority of the guidance issued in guideline decisions of this court. They therefore provide no justifiable basis for interfering with a sentencing decision in which the sentencing judge applied the existing guidance of the court.’
Judges:
Lord Judge LCJ, Penry-Davey J and Irwin J
Citations:
[2010] EWCA Crim 200, [2010] 2 Cr App R(S) 73
Links:
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Attorney General’s Reference Nos 61, 62 and 63 of 2011 CACD 27-Oct-2011
The AG appealed against sentences imposed on the several defendants for supplying Class A controlled drugs. The sentencer had applied recently proposed guidelines, sentencing them as having low grade involvement in the supply of high quality drugs. . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Sentencing
Updated: 09 February 2022; Ref: scu.401857