The court should be very slow to impose what it regards as anything other than the right sentence simply because it or another court has imposed a ‘wrong’ sentence on a co-defendant: ‘The principle served by this approach is that where right thinking members of the public looking at the respective sentences would say that something had gone wrong the court should step in . . It should not be supposed, however, that the court will be prepared to invoke the principle and make the reduction unless there is a really marked disparity, for unless that condition is satisfied it will not regard any sense of grievance felt by an appellant as having sufficient justification. It is only if a fair-minded and right-thinking person would feel that the disparity involved some unfairness to the appellant, as distinct from a possibly rueful feeling that his associate has been more fortunate in his treatment, that a court should intervene.’
Judges:
Hutton LCJ
Citations:
[1994] NIJB 31
Cited by:
Cited – O’Brien and others v Independent Assessor HL 14-Mar-2007
The claimants had been wrongly imprisoned for a murder they did not commit. The assessor had deducted from their compensation a sum to represent the living costs they would have incurred if living freely. They also appealed differences from a . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Northern Ireland, Criminal Sentencing
Updated: 10 May 2022; Ref: scu.250035
