Ministers Propose Terror Sentence Changes Following Streatham Attack
Justice Secretary Robert Buckland has led the charge to pass legislation that prevents the automatic release of terrorist offenders. (Wikimedia)
The British government announced plans to lengthen prison sentences for terror offenders on February 3. The reforms would see prisoners no longer eligible for automatic release at the halfway point of their sentences.
Speaking during a meeting in the House of Commons, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland told MPs that, under the government's proposal, terror offenders will only be considered for release once they have served two-thirds of their sentence and only with the additional approval of the Parole Board: “We cannot have the situation...where an offender—a known risk to innocent members of the public—is released early by automatic process of law without any oversight by the Parole Board,” he said. Buckland added that the law, if passed, would apply to both current and future offenders.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a proponent of the plan, added that “the difficulty is how to apply [the law] retrospectively to the cohort of people who currently qualify,” noting that “it’s time to take action to ensure that people, irrespective of the law we’re bringing in, people in the current stream do not qualify automatically for early release, people convicted of terrorist offenses.”
The news comes two days after Sudesh Amman, age 20, stabbed two people in Streatham High Road, South London, before being killed by police. Amman had been in jail just 10 days prior to the attack and was under police surveillance during the attack. The incident is the second of its nature in recent months, following November’s London Bridge attack, in which 28-year-old Usman Khan fatally stabbed Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt. Khan had been released from jail on license in 2018, half-way through a 16-year sentence for terrorism offenses.
The road to reform, however, will not be an easy one, with skeptics commenting on the proposal’s contentious legality. Lord Carlile, an ex-independent reviewer of terror legislation, argued that the plan is “certainly going to be challenged,” further proceeding to call into question the efficacy of the plan, noting that "in any event, lengthening the sentence doesn't solve the problem because those individuals are still going to have to come out of prison at some point." Instead, he urged for the reintroduction of control orders, noting that they would be an "effective and proportionate response" to combat the problem of automatic release.
Furthermore, the Law Society of England and Wales has warned against the potential for retrospective sentencing to “[clog] up an already overloaded system,” while chair of the Bar Council Amanda Pinto QC reinforced that the reform “should be the subject of careful consideration to ensure that it complies with the rule of law.” Some skeptics have been more critical in their arguments, with organizations such as the interest group Liberty going as far as to call the application of such measures “dangerous” and a “cause of increasing concern for our civil liberties.”
Regardless of the outcome, British citizens may still worry about volatile felons after these attacks.