Issue 154  8th August 2020

Following rigorous health and safety assessments, two more crown courts are listed to resume trials. This will bring the total number of courts hearing jury trials to 64, out of a total of 77 courts open. In addition, Prospero House, the first Nightingale court, established because of the COVID-19 pandemic, started to hear cases on 3 August.

• Worcester - 10 August 2020
• Shrewsbury - 10 August 2020

Automatically discounted prison sentences for criminals who plead guilty at the earliest opportunity may be abolished in a bid to secure public confidence, it has been reported today.

Lord chancellor Robert Buckland QC is said to be studying proposals to end the current practice of giving convicted criminals a third off their sentences if they plead guilty the first time they are asked in court. It is believed that the policy is likely to initially focus on murder and manslaughter, but could be extended to other serious offences.

The government has been forced into a U-turn over defendants being required to state their nationality at their first appearance before criminal courts. Senior judges and lawyers told ministers that collecting nationality information at the start of criminal cases breached privacy laws. Only defendants who are convicted and given a prison sentence will now be asked to give their nationality, for the purpose of possible deportation.

HM Courts & Tribunals Service emailed magistrates telling them to stop their legal advisers asking defendants their nationality ’with immediate effect’. This followed a decision by the Criminal Procedure Rule Committee, which is chaired by lord chief justice Lord Burnett of Maldon, that the collection of nationality information by the courts at the beginning of a case did not comply with the Data Protection Act 2018, as the detail was not necessary at that stage.

One of the first Nightingale Courts, opened to help tackle the mammoth backlog of criminal cases, got off to a shaky start, when legal files went missing, hearings had to be adjourned and the judge was forced to explain the lack of a dock to confused jurors.

Prospero House close to London Bridge is sitting as an extension to Southwark Crown Court, where two cases were listed on Monday morning. But both hearings had to be adjourned due to technical difficulties.

A judge has ordered that a suspected drug dealer be released from prison because a lack of courtrooms means he will not face trial until next year... Ministers have hired facilities at ten sites to create “Nightingale” courts but in an unusually outspoken criticism of the government, Judge Keith Raynor said that “many defendants in custody will not be tried until well into 2021”. He was speaking at Woolwich crown court in London during a hearing regarding Richard Graham, 49, who was arrested in December and charged.

Pc Andrew Harper's widow is launching a campaign for criminals convicted of killing emergency workers to spend the rest of their lives in jail. Lissie Harper is calling for "Andrew's Law" in memory of her husband that would see harsher punishments for anyone who kills a police officer, firefighter, nurse, doctor or paramedic.

Mrs Harper said: ... "I hope that by creating a new "Andrew’s Law" - that sees any person who commits a crime that results in the death of an emergency worker being jailed for life - that those that have to go through what I have been through in the future get the justice that they rightly deserve."