MITIGATION

A 29-year extended sentence, which included a custodial term of 21 years, imposed on a young adult offender following a campaign of rape against victims aged between 13 and 16, was excessive. Insufficient weight had been given to the offender’s age, lack of maturity and unstable background. An extended sentence of 26 years, with an 18-year custodial term, was appropriate.

Where a 19-year-old offender had taken advantage of a 12-year-old girl’s willingness to engage in sexual activity there were no exceptional circumstances that justified a non-custodial sentence; a community order was replaced by a sentence of three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment.

An 18-month detention and training order was reduced to 12 months where a 16-year-old offender had pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity to four offences of rape of a child under 13. The offender and the 12-year-old victim had been in a relationship since meeting at school and, although the judge had been right to impose a custodial sentence, sufficient allowance had not been made for the available mitigation and the need to keep custody to a minimum for young offenders.

The creation of indecent pseudo images of children, by superimposing photographs of a child’s head onto photographs of naked adults in indecent poses, constituted possession, and not production, of indecent photographs of children within the sentencing guidelines. Production offences did not include those where pseudo images were made using images taken from other sources. A sentence of two years’ imprisonment imposed on an offender of previous good character was reduced to a five-month suspended sentence with a requirement to attend a sexual offences treatment programme.

A non-custodial sentence was unduly lenient for a young offender of previous good character who had pleaded guilty to sexual offences involving a girl under 13: a custodial sentence of two and a half years was substituted.

A sentence of 15 months’ imprisonment imposed for 14 historic indecent assaults was unduly lenient and was increased to one of 30 months. Even though the offender, a highly regarded television and radio presenter with no previous convictions, was 83 years old, in poor health, and had not offended for over 25 years, the original sentence did not reflect the offences’ criminality given their lifelong impact on the victims and public concern over sexual crimes against children and young victims.

A sentence of 12 years’ imprisonment for rape was reduced to 10 and a half years where the sentencing judge had failed to have sufficient regard to the unusual circumstances of the offence, in particular the effect upon the offender and the complainant, his former partner, of the death of their child.

A judge had not erred in adopting a 30-year starting point for the minimum term when sentencing a young offender to detention for life following his conviction for the murder of a 16-year-old girl, on the basis that the murder involved sexual or sadistic conduct and fell within the Criminal Justice Act 2003 Sch.21 para.5(2)(e), notwithstanding the offender’s limited intellectual ability and profound psychological and emotional difficulties.

A community order with a requirement to attend a sex offender’s programme and attend probation appointments for three years imposed on a 72-year-old offender who had pleaded guilty to six offences of indecent assault on females under 13, which had taken place up to 40 years previously, was not unduly lenient and a non-custodial sentence was in the proper range of sentences available to the judge who had exercised extreme caution in assessing the circumstances of the case.