Jake Richards acknowledges ‘unimaginable pain’ of Harper’s family but says government faces an ‘unenviable position’
Continuing his media round on the airwaves this morning, justice minister Jake Richards said he understood the “strength of feeling” among police about PC Andrew Harper’s death but that without prison places officers would not be able to do their jobs.
Richards said that Harper’s Law strengthens the sentence for perpetrators who commit such offences but that “it doesn’t work retrospectively”.
The new regime comes into effect from October the first. The sentences, or the offences, sorry, which have been carved out, have been published online.
Manslaughter is not one of those offences, and it would be wrong to pick out individual cases within different offending cohorts. That wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be lawful either.
Well, we’ve set out and published all the offences which have been now carved out of the new scheme that begins in October.
Those are all online, several pages. But what we have been very clear is that we cannot carve out every single offence that people might want us to do so.
They weren’t thought through. There was no preparatory work at all done by the government because they were essentially running a system which was out of control, and that this is fundamentally different.
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