Dominic Casciani

Three senior judges will be put on this case.

I'm willing to bet that the three judges chosen for this case will be among the most experienced that the Court will have available because of the public clamour to get answers over this.

They will then receive, basically, an argument from the Crown.

on behalf of the Attorney General saying, look, this is an unduly lenient sentence because if you compare this to other ones, custody should have been considered and we don't understand why not.

There was a case mentioned during this trial to the trial judge, which basically said that juvenile offenders convicted of rape can get a hefty jail term

They will then hear the arguments from the barristers or are likely to hear the arguments from the barristers for the three boys, which will basically reiterate what the trial judge was told about their backgrounds and almost certainly make the case that this outcome was the fair one taken into account.

the prospects, which are hopeful for rehabilitation, and then they will rule.

It's a pretty quick process once it begins, because typically what happens is the Court of Appeal spends a lot of time reading in.

The judges are pretty quick readers.

They'll get their heads around this, and then it'll probably be all over.

It'll probably take, I suspect, half a day, something like that.

They're normally quite quick, these things.

We haven't got a date yet, and sometimes these kind of hearings take an age to get to the course of appeal.

I think there's possibly a reason why this might be dealt with more quickly than other cases, thinking about it.

It's because of the possibility that the sentence is going to be changed from effectively a community order, where these three boys are in the community and receiving rehabilitation and supervision in the community, being shifted from that to a form of youth custody,

at which point they'd be taken into a secure children's home, effectively a form of imprisonment.

And if that's going to happen, they're going to need to know their fate sooner rather than later.

And I suspect that will mean the Court of Appeal may end up expediting this one and actually dealing with it quite quickly.

No, no.

I wouldn't load it to that high.