Sentencing Discounts

Radio NZ reports:

A victim’s advocate is describing sentencing discounts for offenders as a courtroom “lolly scramble” that lets survivors down and offenders off the hook. …

National was now considering changing the sentencing process to limit the discounts people could get.

This might look like making some discounts like ‘youth’ or ‘remorse’ one-offs and establishing a hard discount cap to restrict how much sentences can shrink.

This could include factors like youth or remorse being unavailable for reoffenders and hard caps on how much a sentence can shrink.

“There are good arguments for discounts … but where it becomes difficult is if you get multiple discounts, one on top of the other, and the outcome being so far removed from the original, then we know we have an issue,” Goldsmith said.

You absolutely need discounts (and add-ons for aggravating factors) to have fair and reasonable sentences. A first time 18 year old offender should get a lesser sentence than a 45 year old repeat offender, for example. Someone who is genuinely remorseful should get a lighter sentence than someone who is not. Someone who pleads guilty straight away should get a lesser sentence than someone who doesn’t.

But Goldsmith is right that the cumulative effect of the discounts can end up with ridiculously light sentences such as home detention for raping multiple girls.

I also suspect that some Judges reverse engineer their discounts. They know if they get the sentence to under two years they can sentence them to home detention rather than prison. So they ensure that the discounts add up to enough to get it down to 18 – 21 months or so.

So we need discounts but I like the idea that there is some limit to how often you can get a discount for youth and remorse. If you keep bashing people up, you are obviously not very remorseful.

So a limit of say three sentencing decisions where an offender can get a discount for remorse or youth could work well.

I also like the idea of an overall cap on the discount an offender can get. Perhaps two caps – one for pleading guilty of up to 25% (which is the status quo) and one of up to 20% for all other factors. That means the discounts would never reduce the unadjusted sentence by more than 45%.