MacDonald: The law needs reforming
Sir Ken MacDonald, former director of public prosecutions, supports moves for reform of murder charges, on the Today programme:
“It is not just a question of people who are not guilty being convicted, there is a risk that people who are guilty will be acquitted of murder.
“My sense is that a lot of juries who instinctively kick against the idea that someone should be convicted of murder with a mandatory life sentence, if they intend less than killing.
“It should be fair, it should be firm and it should be explicable. I don’t think that we are presently achieving those qualities in our homicide law.”
“Many of us think that that’s an aspect of the law which needs reforming, that we should have degrees of murder, rather in the way they do in the US.
“First degree would be killing with the intention to kill, second degree would be killing with intention to do grievous bodily harm.
“I think if you had those sorts of categories, it would be much easier to look at a joint enterprise case and describe particular roles and particular degrees of culpability to individual defendants, rather than sweeping up perhaps large numbers of people who in some cases might have been fairly peripheral to the enterprise,”
