Issue 180  13th February 2021

Ministers have been accused of an “utterly ridiculous” overreach of power for threatening to impose 10-year jail sentences on travellers dodging quarantine rules... Boris Johnson’s spokesman confirmed on Wednesday that the 10-year sentence, announced by the health secretary, Matt Hancock, for people lying about returning from travel to coronavirus hotspots, was the maximum penalty allowed under the 1981 Forgery and Counterfeiting Act...

A number of leading legal voices criticised the measure. Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, told the Guardian it was “inappropriate for the kind of infraction, serious though it can be, that they have in mind”. The former attorney general Dominic Grieve said he believed the figure had been “plucked out of the air” and said it could only be the case that the sentence was imposed for forgery. “But this is a regulatory offence, and no regulatory offence I can think of, of this type, attracts a 10-year maximum sentence,” he told the BBC. “To suggest 10-years sentence for forgery, because I think that’s what it must be because I cannot see how they would ever get a regulatory offence attracting a 10-years imprisonment through parliament, is a mistake.”

On 3 March 2008 Colin Norris was convicted, by majority, of murdering four women and attempting to murder another, by injecting them with insulin. All five women were elderly inpatients on orthopaedic wards where Mr Norris worked as a nurse. Following a detailed review of this complex and difficult case, the CCRC has decided to refer all five of Mr Norris’s convictions to the Court of Appeal...

Mr Norris appealed against his conviction but was turned down by the Court of Appeal in December 2009. He applied to the CCRC in October 2011. As part of its highly complex review, the CCRC considered new expert evidence presented by Mr Norris’s representatives and instructed its own expert to provide a number of reports. The experts agree that the hypoglycaemia in the four patients other than Mrs Hall may be accounted for by natural causes. The new expert evidence has also highlighted several other relevant developments in the understanding of hypoglycaemia, including its prevalence in the elderly and frail, which cast further doubt on the expert opinion relied upon by the prosecution at trial. This new expert evidence explored recent developments in a complex area where scientific understanding is still developing.

The council-owned space conveniently adjoins Taunton Magistrates’ Court and was previously used to train councillors in how to write budgets and deliver speeches. The venue will host both a magistrates’ and a Crown courtroom – providing vital capacity to minimise delays.

More than 15,000 people were accidentally deleted in their entirety from the Police National Computer at the start of the year, the Home Office has admitted. After a month of uncertainty around an IT blunder, minister Kit Malthouse said in a written statement that a total of 209,550 offence records relating to 112,697 individuals had been deleted in error...

The government says the error – which covers fingerprints, DNA and arrest records – may not lead to a permanent data loss as duplicate records may still be available on other systems. But it has been unable to say how many profiles and other items could end up being saved. In a statement, Mr Malthouse said the deletion affected fewer than 200 fingerprint records and that work was ongoing to recover as many as possible. He estimated that it would take around 12 weeks to restore available data.

The Law Commission has decided to rethink a hate crime proposal after 'serious concerns' were raised that people could be prosecuted for comments made in their home. Consulting on hate crime laws last year, the commission proposed removing the current exclusion of words or behaviour used in a dwelling from ‘stirring up hatred’ offences. The consultation paper stated that the dwelling exception was poorly targeted, as it could include a meeting held in a large private house but would exclude a private conversation in an office...

However, even though the commission is still analysing consultation responses, 'it is apparent that there is serious concern with the provisional proposal simply to remove the dwelling exemption', Green LJ said. The commission’s criminal team is now looking at 'alternative ways in which the law might be reformed to ensure the laws, which criminalise only the most serious forms of incitement, are compatible with both the right to freedom of expression and respect for one’s home and private and family life. The issue of course is where and how to draw the line', he said.