In court
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550517752719 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Subject Matter | In court |
In court
In court
Nigel Stone, Visiting Fellow in the School of Psychology, University of East Anglia,
reviews recent appeal judgments and other judicial developments that inform
sentencing and early release.
General sentencing issues
Professional and persistent burglar
Aged in his early 40s, H. burgled a family home in the daytime while the occupants
were out, making an untidy search and removing valuables, including a safe that
had been secured to the ground and its contents, stealing money, jewellery and
other items of financial and sentimental value totalling around £15,000. Of 15
previous convictions for 22 offences, incurred between 1988 and 2016, residential
burglary had featured in 2005, 2006, 2012 and 2016. He had first attracted a
mandatory custodial sentence (requiring a statutory minimum term under PCC(S)A
2000 s111) for such offending in 2012, and when he came to be sentenced for the
current crime he was serving a second such sentence (expressed as a term of 876
days) for domestic burglary committed two months after that offence. Several of his
burglary convictions, including his current offence, had involved the homes of
persons of Chinese or Indian extraction, but he was not dealt with on the basis that
he had targeted victims because of their ethnicity but on the basis that he believed
such homes would contain more valuable property, readily stolen and sold on. He
had thus evidenced a degree of professionalism and planning and ‘a resolute
refusal to be deterred by prison sentences’.
The Crown Court had concluded that this offence should be identified as a
Category 1 dwelling-house burglary within the relevant sentencing guideline
(2011), given greater harm due to the trauma occasioned (as described in the
victim personal statement which referred to the impact on a child aged five within
the family) and increased culpability because the judge inferred that the crime had
been committed by a ‘team’ that had come adequately equipped enough to be able
to remove a safe. The fact that the premises had not been occupied at time of break-
in was considered a further mark of the perpetrators’ professionalism. Accordingly,
the judge said that H. should receive ‘a professional’s sentence’.
Probation Journal
2018, Vol. 65(1) 111–125
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550517752719
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The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
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