ABSTRACT
In March 2007, only weeks away from completing this book, I attend a lecture by Lord Phillips, Lord Chief Justice, at Birmingham University. The topic is murder. The lecture lasts for well over an hour during which Lord Phillips takes an attentive audience of mainly students and academics through some of the difficulties which make this area of law cry out for reform (Phillips 2007a). The following days, the knives in the media are out for the Lord Chief Justice. Predictably, his criticism of mandatory life sentences does not go down well with the tabloids. The gist of their commentary is that once again the senior judiciary is too lenient and out of touch. One remark in particular seems to have stuck with both broadsheets and tabloids, namely the Lord Chief Justice’s (2007: 2) statement that ‘in 30 years’ time the prisons will be full of geriatric lifers’. The Guardian journalist Marcel Berlins (2007) rushes to the defence of Lord Phillips: ‘I expect exaggerated, misleading and sometimes deliberately false responses to just about any comment the lord chief justice makes about sentencing policy. Successive home secretaries and certain newspapers can be relied on to react in Pavlovian fashion.’ How are we to read this particular incident? Is it part of the drip, drip, drip effect of the media inexorably leading to the erosion of the authority and independence of key legal actors? Or is it business as usual, as indeed Berlins’ comments suggest: a senior judge rocks the boat, politicians give him a slap on the wrist and the media spout their customary distortions, but before too long the storm dies down and everyone moves on?
