Prisoners (Disclosure of Information About Victims) Bill — House of Lords, 2020-05-20
Topic: Law and Crime
David John Maclean (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, these little amendments are straightforward—at least, in my view. If passed, they would make it mandatory for the Parole Board not to release any prisoners who refused to divulge where and how they have disposed of the bodies of their victims. I have built in an exception for the minority who may have genuine and irreversible memory loss and are therefore unable to state that The reason for the amendments s quite simple. We all know that even when there is no criminality but a person is killed and no body is found, or someone is lost at sea, relatives find it very difficult to get closure. But where someone has been murdered, we have all seen the terrible distress of the parents—for example, of the Moors murders victims or of those murdered by the IRA—when the perpetrators will not reveal what they did with the bodies. It is, we are all told, one of the most difficult things for relatives to contend with. Can one imagine the anguish and the sheer injustice of it if a convict refuses to reveal what they have done with the victims, they continue to thumb their nose at the relatives of the victims and the Parole Board, but they can still be considered for early release My noble and learned friend and other noble and learned friends may say, "Well, don’t worry, in those circumstances the Parole Board would be highly unlikely to release that convict", but why should it be at the discretion of the Parole Board based on its "belief" as to a person’s honesty and integrity If a convict, in full possession of their faculties and their memory, refuses to divulge what they did with the bodies of their victims, why should the Parole Board be put in the invidious position of having to come to a subjective judgment based on psychologists’ reports. Parliament should say that, in such circumstances, no one will be considered—I stress "considered"—for early release until they say what they have done with the bodies. If a convict refuses to admit that they have done anything wrong in killing someone, would they be considered for release? I believe not. Thus, if they will not talk about the disposal of their victims, they should automatically be excluded from any consideration of early release It is not as if the Parole Board has a great track record of coming to the right judgments, as we have seen in the Worboys cabbie rapist case. He should never have been considered for early release and is rightly still behind bars Only last week, Mr Justin Russell, the Chief Inspector of Probation, released a report stating that the number of murders by offenders released on probation rose from 70 in 2015 to 114 in 2018, an incredible increase and a fifth of all homicides in England and Wales. Of these, two-thirds had been assessed as "low or medium" risk on release, which meant that there was a lesser level of supervision and checks by probation officers and police This is not the time or place for me to set out my views on the naivety of many on the Parole Board, who swallow any old guff that the psychologists put in front of them: that a convict has seen the error of their ways and is now safe to release. Indeed, I do not have to make that observation, since the statistics that I have just cited speak for themselves Sociopaths, psychopaths, serial killers and rapists such as Ian Brady, Worboys and Joseph McCann are incredibly devious and calculating. If they can qualify for consideration for early release by keeping quiet about what they did with the bodies, why on earth should they own up? By doing so, they might trigger a further investigation which could lead to a further charge for another murder. Also, there might be such revulsion at how they disposed of the bodies that no Parole Board would ever dare consider them for early release. Therefore, there is an incentive for them to keep quiet and let everyone think that they killed their victims nicely and gave them a Christian burial We should use the certainty of no consideration for early release as the only weapon we have to get those people to talk. The Parole Board cannot do that, since the Bill allows them to consider their application and come to a belief judgment. If we remove that possibility, there is a chance of getting them to talk about what they did to the bodies. For the sake of grieving relatives and for the sake of justice, I beg to move.