Report comment

This hits the nail firmly on the head.

"Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor at civil rights firm Birnberg Peirce and the charity's founding director, said: 'This will be an unprecedented legal challenge. Where a decision appears to be so irrational, as it does in this case given all the known facts, there is an arguable basis to challenge the rules preventing publication of reasons. If we get access to the reasons then we can explore grounds for challenging a decision which is so insulting and horrific for all the victims concerned.'"

If a PB operating within the legal framework, procedures and processes governing its decision making and having reviewed the evidence properly exercises its discretion reaches a decision then that is the end of it.

There is a problem, while we can all look up the legal framework etc, we cannot look up the evidence (or its deployment or non-deployment) or its interplay in the exercise of its discretion. No doubt the LC has now seen it and has reached his decision. We still don't know.

That problem needs to be addressed. In these days it is no longer good enough to have "secret" decisions. Reporting can be anonymised, except in exceptional circumstances. The Family Courts do it and the sky has not fallen in.

At the same time it may, probably will, be useful to look at the way in which the PB is allowed to go about its business.

For example - and here I'm deliberately flying a kite - if the PB in reviewing risk takes account of post sentence behavioural change, should it be allowed to take account of evidence of pre sentence (but uncharged) behaviour - old propensity? And please don't say that this would be unfair - maybe - and difficult, I'm well aware that it would.