John Warboys

[sp1814]

No judicial review of the parole decision.

Your thoughts?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42747687

[emmie]

several of the women are mounting a legal challenge to get the case reviewed, i hope they are successful.

[mikey4444]

Then the CPS need to explain that decision fully. This is serious. A very dangerous man is about to be let out of prison.

[emmie]

he is not the only one, there was a news item about a serial rapist, not sure if he did other crimes, about to be released as well.

[mikey4444]

Lets hope so Emmie, but it doesn't look good for those women.

[New Judge]

It is no use politicians bleating on about this.

It was they who facilitated the application for release by prisoners serving indeterminate sentences (and some serving longer determinate sentences). They also put in place the law that prevents parole board hearings being held in public or for the reasons for their decisions being published. Those were conscious decisions made by them for reasons best known to them.

The fault in this case is that Mr Warboys was sentenced inappropriately at the outset and that was because of the sentencing framework endorsed by MPs. They have no justification, therefore, to display hand wringing episodes when a parole board decision is one that they or the public do not like. There is no need for indeterminate sentences and so no need for a parole board. Those convicted should be sentenced to determinate sentences and those sentences should be served in full. That’s what MPs should be lobbying for. But they would have to build a few more prisons.

[mikey4444]

NJ...as regards indeterminate sentences, I think you may be correct.....they rely too much on a Parole Board having the final say, and being incapable of being wrong.

But in this case, there is widespread unease about the Parole Boards actions over Warboys, especially as he was deemed not suitable for a transfer to a more open type of prison so recently.

You know the existing law better than most of us on here. What sanction does anybody have, if they think that the parole Board has made a mistake.....what provision, if any, was left to question their decisions ?

[Garaman]

I might have the wrong end of the stick, but I thought indeterminate sentences were to protect us more given that they don't guarantee that the prisoner will be released at all. In other words instead of handing out a twenty year sentence where the offender serves ten if well behaved, the offender is given a minimum of ten years and a review body will then determine what to do after that time. That seems better to me than guaranteeing a release, providing of course that the review systems works!

We do seem to have got ourselves in an odd situation where we reward prisoners who behave normally by reducing their sentences, when perhaps we should be punishing those that don't by increasing them.

[mikey4444]

Garaman....but when the Parole Board makes a decision like this, it causes wide-spread unease. It also make people wonder if they know what they are doing.

People need to have confidence in the law. I am not sure that in the case of Warboys, that confidence is there.