Over the past fifteen years or so, a number of ‘guideline’ judgments have been delivered by the courts to assist with formulating the appropriate sentence for a given offence type. This article looks at the origin of those guidelines, the offences for which there are guidelines available, and what the individual guidelines provide.
The Judicial Council has published a database of Court of Appeal decisions from 2014 to 2023, but in a format that is a little difficult to interrogate. I’ve taken the data and made it available here in a format that makes it easier to search and analyse.
In this article I look at (i) the legislative presumptions which come to the aid of the prosecuting authorities in cases of this type, and (ii) the sentence guidelines that can be extracted from the caselaw to date.