Could a teenager who repeatedly hands out drugs to her friends receive the same sentence as a wholesale drug dealer? This, too, would be possible.Punishment has to fit not just the crime but the individual. That is why we have judges and, given that juries are to decide guilt, it is hard to know what a judge is supposed to judge, if it is not the appropriate sentence. Opinion on a jury, no less representative of the public, is often more moderate. Knowing nothing of individual circumstances, except what it gets from selective newspaper reports, the opinion of the saloon bar wants no mercy for criminals.
They are supposed to stand above transient panics and nine-day outrages. If public opinion was a certain guide to justice, we could leave criminals to kangaroo courts and lynch parties.Public opinion, in any case, comes in different guises. Everybody is swayed by prevailing fashion; politicians are swayed more vigorously than most by the need to flash their thighs on the party conference catwalk. Remember unit fines - the idea that court penalties should be calibrated according to offenders' incomes? That policy collapsed within months, as everybody in the legal profession warned that it would.
Mr Howard's new sentencing policies are in direct contradiction to policies embodied in the Criminal Justice Act 1991. Indeed, the Home Secretary rests his case that judges are handing down over-lenient sentences partly on figures gleaned from the period immediately after the Act, when the judiciary was prevented by statute from taking previous convictions into account. To repeat: judges can, and often do, get it wrong. When such an impressive consensus is ranged against his proposals, any politician should reconsider It is most unlikely that Mr Howard will do so. Drivers there behave like charioteers, honking with grand superiority as they clear the road before them. The marquess worked hard, tripling his inheritance through sheep farming and oil-prospecting.
Leading restricted social lives, they have always been remote from public concerns But this is the point of judges. Not because he does not understand what is at stake - the Home Secretary is, after all, a QC himself But he prefers the rule of the mob to the rule of law. Judges, it is true, do not always know best; but it is certain that politicians do not know any better. A glance at the record of this government alone illustrates that point. It is a necessary condition of constitutional government under the rule of law." That debate focused on the extent to which Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, proposes to usurp the role of judges and the courts by having Parliament set minimum sentences for certain offences and mandatory life sentences for others.