00:00So Brian, my question is related to your recommendations 27, where you recommend a 40% reduction in sentences for an early guilty plea.
00:13Do you think there's a risk that increasing the maximum reduction in sentence length for an early plea may place pressure on defendants to plead guilty inappropriately, and if so, how would risk be mitigated in those circumstances?
00:26Well, I hope not. At the moment, the discount for an early guilty plea is a third, so I'm only suggesting increasing it by 7%.
00:38Certainly, in my practice, always to say, under no circumstances do you plead guilty if you didn't do it.
00:45We do need to cut out of the system cases which defendants are gaming, are playing the system.
00:54A corollary of my 40% is that I've suggested, and of course it would be for the Sentencing Council to decide, that there should be a wider discretion after the first opportunity.
01:08And I'll tell you what I mean by that.
01:10If somebody is caught red-handed with his hand on Granny's teapot in somebody else's house, to say that he should have a percentage, 25% after the first stage, when lots of work has had to be done, I think is not necessary.
01:30Equally, to say that to somebody who pleads guilty on the day before a nine-month trial, which is going to cost the state an unbelievable amount of money, to say that's restricted to 10%, the judge needs a discretion to be able to reward appropriately, having regard to all the circumstances of the case.
01:51I would hope that nobody would plead guilty because a discount of 40% was available.
02:00I hope that nobody pleads guilty because a discount of a third is available.
02:03But I am encouraging the court to be much more prepared to discuss this sort of question, as you know in the reference to Goodyear.
02:16And there's a case called Reading, which adds to Goodyear.
02:20To try to ensure that only those cases which require a trial go forward to a trial.
02:30The independent sentencing review recommended legislating to ensure that short custodial sentences were used only in exceptional circumstances.
02:38So, with your recommendation of the 40% reduction, how can the government ensure that those recommendations work together to solve the prison and court capacity crisis?
02:51I don't see why they don't work together.
02:55It won't mean that people don't go to prison for short terms or for offences that you might not otherwise think.
03:05If you don't get to send anybody to prison for shoplifting, but you do send people to prison for shoplifting 27 times before lunchtime on Tuesday, while on bail and on a suspended sentence for shoplifting.
03:20And that's critical for our retail society, who are losing millions.
03:26I still think it's the fact of going to prison rather than whether it's eight months or nine months or 14 months.
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