Unduly lenient sentences performance chart (2006)
Lenient sentences 2003: part 1
Lenient sentences 2003: part 2
Lenient sentences 2004: part 1
Lenient sentences 2004: part 2
Lenient sentences 2004: part 3
Lenient sentences 2005

MORE than 200 of Britain’s top judges have given “unduly lenient” sentences to criminals guilty of sex offences or other serious crimes, according to a list released by the attorney-general.

Lord Goldsmith has for the first time listed 339 cases over the past three years in which he has challenged judges for letting off criminals — including killers, rapists and child abusers — with light sentences.

He took all of the cases to the Court of Appeal to seek tougher sentences, with more than three-quarters being judged to be “unduly lenient”. In an interview this weekend, Goldsmith said he was particularly concerned about judges being lenient on sex offences against children which needed “to be dealt with very harshly indeed”.

He said some judges did not appreciate the long-lasting trauma of such crimes on children; in one case it had been felt necessary to bar a judge from handling cases involving children. His office said: “He [the judge] just didn’t get it.”

Calling for tougher sentences for serious violent and sex offences, Goldsmith added:

“It’s really important for everyone to understand that because a child is quite young it doesn’t mean the child forgets what happens.”

Among the list of more than 200, which accounts for a tenth of the senior members of the judiciary, is Adrian Smith. He was judged to have been unduly lenient on a 53-year-old man who raped and sexually abused his daughter hundreds of times during the years when she was aged between 12 and 28.

The daughter conceived two children, one of which survived. Last year the Court of Appeal doubled the judge’s initial jail sentence of five years to 10.

Judge Marten Coates, 59, gave an absolute discharge to a man who admitted indecently assaulting his two young nieces as a teenager because the pre-sentence report was unavailable.

The appeal court last year gave Ian Lammas, 46, a three-year community rehabilitation order and described Coates’s actions as “inappropriate”. Coates yesterday declined to comment.

One of the biggest sentence increases involved Judge Robert Winstanley, who sentenced Luan Plakici, a 26-year-old Albanian, to 10 years for smuggling kidnapped women into Britain and forcing them to become sex slaves. It was more than doubled to 23 years by the Court of Appeal to send a message that human trafficking was “despicable”.

Michelle Elliott, director of Kidscape, the children’s charity, said: “I have been astonished by some of the lenient sentences with child pornography and sex abuse. Any judge who repeatedly gives lenient sentences to paedophiles should be off the bench.”

In the past six years more than 2,000 complaints against judges or tribunal members have been investigated, but only 28 have resulted in disciplinary measures. The last and only time the lord chancellor barred a judge was in 1983.

The judge with the highest number of “unduly lenient” appeals is Stuart Fish, who retired last year. Ten of his judgments have been been found to be unduly lenient by the Court of Appeal since 2003.

One of his most controversial was in July 2005 when he allowed a man who attempted to rape a three-year-old girl to walk free after the man claimed he was “experimenting” and had “got carried away”. The appeal court jailed him for 3½ years.

Smith and Winstanley were unavailable for comment. Fish said: “To be regarded as unduly lenient would be a big surprise to one or two people that I know that are doing 20 years, two at 17, three at 15, and a 74-year-old man doing 12 years. It’s all a matter of balance.”

The Judicial Office said: “There are many cases where the Court of Appeal reduces sentences without implying any criticism of the sentencing judge, sometimes indeed because of changes of circumstances after the original sentencing decision.”

• A confidential government review claims that police and courts are being stifled by human rights legislation. Leaked documents drawn up by a Whitehall team show that up to 24 aspects of policing, court procedures and immigration are being impeded.

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