Bereaved Families Demand Manslaughter Exclusion From Early Release
More than thirty families bereaved by homicide wrote to the justice secretary demanding all forms of manslaughter be excluded from the prison early-release scheme, saying victims are “being asked to bear the consequences of the prison capacity crisis”. Signatories include the mother of Nottingham attacks victim Barnaby Webber. A cabinet minister defended the scheme as the alternative to “the wholesale collapse of the criminal justice system”, as Labour warned police cells could otherwise run out.
The letter forces the question the scheme was designed to blur: manslaughter is a single label stretched across everything from a pub punch to the Nottingham killings, where diminished responsibility turned three murders into hospital orders and a national grief into a legal category — and a release scheme that treats the label rather than the case invites exactly this coalition of the bereaved. The government’s defence is arithmetic, not principle: the cells are full, the courts are backed up, and Ms Phillipson’s “unpalatable choices” is as honest as ministers get. But exclusion lists grow by tragedy — the Harper case already forced one amendment. Watch whether manslaughter joins the list — and what that does to the numbers the scheme exists to relieve.