Solemn sentencing is no circus as cameras enter English courts | UK criminal justice

Almost 100 years after a ban on cameras in criminal courts was enshrined in law, the first broadcast from an English crown court went out on Thursday and is likely to have left many viewers asking: “Why has it taken so long?”

Resistance in the past has often been motivated by fears that allowing in cameras could risk turning cases into the sort of media circus seen around high-profile US trials such as that of OJ Simpson or, albeit a civil case, the recent Johnny Depp v Amber Heard defamation proceedings.

But what viewers saw on Thursday was something altogether different, with the cameras focused solely on Judge Sarah Munro QC delivering in solemn tones her sentencing remarks in a manslaughter case.

Sky News, the BBC, ITN and PA have all been given permission to film in courts, and the broadcasters showed Thursday’s footage live.

Before Munro made history, the lord chancellor, Dominic Raab, said the move would improve public understanding of the justice system, and anyone who has not attended a crown court sentencing in person may have been surprised by what they saw.

Reporting of sentencing remarks by journalists is inevitably limited but viewers would have gained an insight into how judges balance aggravating and mitigating factors and are bound by sentencing guidelines – something that is often not mentioned when there is outrage over a particular sentence.

Munro spoke for almost 20 minutes before sentencing Ben Oliver, who has autism spectrum disorder, to a life sentence with a minimum term of 10 years and eight months for the manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility of his grandfather David Oliver.

She deemed his level of responsibility to be at “the very top of the medium level range” (the three levels being low, medium and high) and listed aggravating factors such as Oliver’s previous offending – he had been convicted of sexual offences against a girl – and the suffering he inflicted on his grandfather.

Mitigating factors included the “irreparable damage” done by abuse during Oliver’s upbringing and the fact that other members of the family had discussed killing David Oliver over unproven sexual abuse allegations against him.

It was a far cry from the scenes often witnessed in televised trials in the US. And with filming in crown courts to be limited to sentencing remarks only – and even then only when the judge agrees – there is no threat of an episode like the glove not fitting OJ Simpson coming to screens in the UK.

There are some who would like to see things in England and Wales go further, given that the other benefit mooted by Raab is transparency.

Chris Daw QC, the author of Justice on Trial, said televising sentencing remarks was a good first step but he would open things up completely – with protections for witnesses and vulnerable defendants – to correct media inaccuracies but also to show up underfunding of the criminal justice system.

“Where there’s just no lawyers to deal with the case, they [viewers] could see the judge’s frustration, they could see the impact that has on the witnesses and on victims, and I just feel like there’d be more pressure from the public to do something about it,” he said. “At the moment I just don’t think the public realises how completely broken the system is.”

Thursday’s small but significant change comes as transparency is being diminished elsewhere. Introduced in 2015, the single justice procedure (SJP) – administrative decisions made in closed court – accounts for more than 50% of cases passing through magistrates courts in England and Wales each year, with 535,000 SJP cases heard in 2020.

Additionally, under the Judicial Review and Courts Act, which came into effect this month, other magistrates court proceedings are being moved out of open court to be dealt with administratively, in a move that critics say will leave the media with no knowledge of the existence of a “substantial number of criminal cases” at the time they are placed before a court.