The Art of Sentencing

Last week I sentenced my first case of ABH (assault occasioning actual bodily harm) under the new sentencing guidelines.
Generally speaking, the new guidelines have down-graded assault cases, especially the most frequent, that of common assault, but for ABH the sentences have been substantially increased.

The starting point for the case I was involved with, a single unprovoked head-but causing no lasting damage, is 26 weeks imprisonment.

In the retirement room a strange dichotomy emerged; while generally we, on our bench, have bemoaned the down-grading of common assault cases, having to impose community penalties where previously we would have been considering jail, we also, on this occasion, were reluctant to send the perpetrator of the ABH to prison.

But we can’t have it both ways. If we are to follow the guidelines, and the law says we must unless we have good reasons not to and that it would be unjust to do so, we have to follow the intentions of the Sentencing Council which are clearly to increase sentences for the most serious assaults, including ABH, and to reduce those for the more minor cases.

In the event, we gave the defendant every mitigation - first offence, discount for a guilty plea, and that any prison sentence should be as short as possible but we still sent him to jail for 10 weeks. In many ways it was a compromise decision, but that’s often the case and it was a sentence we all could live with. I understand he intends to appeal the sentence and it will be interesting to see what the Crown Court has to say about it.