The Sentencing Academy has published a new paper by our Kalisher Trust intern, Anna Draper, exploring the practical issues arising from the Sentencing Council’s 2018 Overarching Principles: Domestic Abuse guideline.
The paper is available Here
Some of the key issues highlighted in this paper include:
• The difficulty of evidencing whether an offence forms part of a pattern of behaviour for the purposes of sentencing.
• A lack of clarity about exactly when in the sentencing process this guideline is to be consulted and the impact this may have on the sentence imposed.
• Whether reference to this guideline may lead to the double counting of factors that have already been taken into account when following the offence specific guideline.
