Royal Courts of Justice. Photograph by John Allan
The Attorney General, Dominic Grieve QC MP welcomed the decision by the Court of Appeal in finding that murderer Ian McLoughlin should spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of review.
Grieve said:
I am pleased that the Court of Appeal has today confirmed that those who commit the most heinous crimes can be sent to prison for the rest of their lives.
As someone who has killed three times, Ian McLoughlin committed just such a crime, and following today’s judgment he has received the sentence that crime required.
I asked the Court of Appeal to look again at McLoughlin’s original sentence because I did not think that the European Court of Human Rights had said anything which prevented our courts from handing down whole life terms in the most serious cases. The Court of Appeal has agreed with me and today’s judgment gives the clarity our judges need when they are considering sentencing cases like this in the future.
Ian McLoughlin was convicted of manslaughter in 1984, and then murder in 1992, before committing another murder on the day of his release in 2012 while robbing the home of an elderly man.
At the Old Bailey in October last year, Mr Justice Sweeney sentenced McLoughlin to life imprisonment with a 40 year minimum, but said he was barred from passing a whole-life term because of a European judgment that those sentences were in breach of human rights. The Court of Appeal has now increased McLoughlin’s jail term to a whole life sentence.
