ABSTRACT
The only time the judges systematically sought to agree on what was “a ‘normal’ standard of punishment” was in 1901, with their Memorandum on Normal Punishments in Certain Kinds of Crime. Lord Alverstone declared in 1906 that the Judges’ Memorandum was the basis of current sentencing practice by High Court judges. The judges followed, after a fashion, their own sentencing guidelines; and the Court of Criminal Appeal, set up in 1907 to review sentences and set standards for other courts to follow, acted on the basis that there existed a set of informal conventions, the like of which James Fitzjames Stephen had described in the mid-1880s. The extent of divergence in the assessment of punishment by Judges of the High Court, sitting in Courts of criminal jurisdiction, has been much exaggerated. The inclination of the Court towards leniency of punishment which has marked the last 20 years has, on the whole, been justified by results.
