The justice secretary Dominic Raab has decided that a father who was due to be released from prison imminently presents a significant risk of causing serious harm that cannot be safely managed through the usual licence conditions.
The prisoner is Anthony Smith, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018 for injuring his baby son so badly that his legs had to be amputated. The boy was adopted and is now called Tony Hudgell. Smith will continue to be detained while the Parole Board considers his case.
Tony Hudgell’s birth mother, Jody Simpson, was also given what was then the maximum sentence for causing or allowing serious harm to a child. Both prisoners would normally have been released on licence after serving half their sentences in custody.
On 11 August, Raab announced that Simpson presented a significant risk of causing serious harm. Writing about these new powers at the time, I predicted that the justice secretary would refer Smith’s case to the Parole Board too. He has now done so.
Raab said:
The first duty of government is to protect the most vulnerable — and no-one is more vulnerable than a child. I will do everything in my power to prevent another child enduring the abuse inflicted on Tony Hudgell.
That’s why I’ve put Anthony Smith’s release on hold and will be referring his case to the Parole Board so that any risk he might pose is thoroughly checked.
Comment
Raab’s stated grounds for believing that Smith would pose a significant risk of causing serious harm to members of the public — a risk Raab says cannot be managed through the normal licensing conditions — do not seem very persuasive.
Smith has shown he is a danger to children. On release, he could well move in with a mother who has a young child. That child could be at risk. But Smith would be under supervision for the next five years if released now. It would not be very difficult for his probation officer to discover that he was living in a household where there was a vulnerable child. Arrangements could be made to protect that child — by alerting the child’s mother, for example.
As I read the legislation, its purpose was not to ensure that, in Raab’s words, “any risk [a prisoner] might pose is thoroughly checked”. A properly resourced criminal justice system would do that anyway. This new power applies only if the secretary of state believes, on reasonable grounds, that the prisoner’s release would pose a significant risk to the public from the commission of a serious offence. For a belief to be reasonable, it must be based on evidence.
We have yet to see Raab’s evidence. It is now even more important that the Parole Board holds public hearings in these two cases.
Finally, readers may wonder why this post is being published online and sent to my mailing list at 10.30pm on a Saturday night. That was the embargo requested by the Ministry of Justice. It coincides with publication of the Sunday papers and is sometimes set when a minister has given a newspaper interview.