September 23, 2024 3:00pm by David Farrar

Excellent sentencing reforms

Paul Goldsmith announced:

Capping the sentence discounts that judges can apply at 40 per cent when considering mitigating factors unless it would result in manifestly unjust sentencing outcomes.

This is much needed. Some offenders have had 85% discounts which just makes the starting point almost irrelevant. No matter what the starting point is, you end up with a short sentence or home detention.

One defence attorney even tried to claim cumulative discounts of 110%. Presumably that would mean they get not only zero sentence, but time off their next offence!

I do worry about the manifestly unjust exception though as an activist judiciary have changed this from something that used to be very rare, to very common.

Preventing repeat discounts for youth and remorse. Lenient sentences are failing to deter offenders who continue to rely on their youth or expressions of remorse without making serious efforts to reform their behaviour.

Yep, remorse shouldn’t apply more than once, and same for learning from a youthful mistake.

Encouraging the use of cumulative sentencing for offences committed while on bail, in custody, or on parole to denounce behaviour that indicates a disregard for the criminal justice system, as committed to in the National-New Zealand First coalition agreement.

Great idea. Will judges ignore it though?

Implementing a sliding scale for early guilty pleas with a maximum sentence discount of 25 per cent, reducing to a maximum of 5 per cent for a guilty plea entered during the trial. This will prevent undue discounts for late-stage guilty pleas and avoid unnecessary trials that are costly and stressful for victims.

To a degree the judiciary already does this, but it varies from judge to judge. Having more consistency and certainty should be useful.

There is one problem with the proposal though. The proposed 40% maximum cap includes the potential 25% for pleading guilty. Now if the offender is likely to get a 40% reduction anyway due to youth and background, then they may calculate that there is no benefit in pleading guilty as they will get 40% anyway.

The way to solve this would be to remove the guilty plea discount from the overall cap, and reduce the overall cap.

So for example you could have: