Dominic Casciani

It's just that the prosecutors tend to do people who are the absolute experts on what's happened before and what the case law is.

So, for instance, in this case,

when these three were being sentenced, they were referring to a case which is only known by the initials RDP.

And that was a young offender who was 15 at trial.

And he received an eight-year custody, youth custody term.

and they were saying, look, if you look at the facts of this case, the real specific facts of the case, this is very, very similar to what we're dealing with here at Southampton Crown Court.

So what tends to happen is the prosecutors tend to be over that kind of detail about what's been going on in the law.

It's then for the barristers on the defence side to actually make submissions about why you can't apply another case from five years ago to the circumstances of this case.

So it's a balance between those two.

there isn't an imbalance there.

The court has to take both of those into account, but it really is to prosecutors who really have their heads around all the individual laws which have gone in recent years.

It's not like the prosecution are sort of getting another go.

Well, I mean, you could argue they are because the unduly lenient sentence scheme allows them to make those submissions.

And then usually in this case, the Crown Prosecution Service itself has made an unduly lenient sentence application to the Attorney General, to their own boss, in effect.

That's quite unusual if that's happening.

They normally just leave it to the public.

I think it's more a case that ULSs, these cases, they happen.

They don't happen that often because, generally speaking, courts get it right if you look at the outcomes.

A ULS very, very rarely leads to some kind of massive change in the sentence.

So what tends to happen is they tend to be outliers, these cases.