Does anyone have an opinion about the practice of immediately ‘transferring’ a patient to hospital under s47 once they have been sentenced or recalled under a licence -so that they never actually spend any time in prison. This seems to be increasingly common - I don’t think it used to happen.
We’ve had a case like these where the offender (convicted of murder) after a thorough examination of the psychiatric evidence spent less than an hour in prison before being transferred to a medium secure unit. The victims’ family were not happy and said the doctors had subverted the will of the court.
Yes - I suppose where the IO is murder they can’t use s45A but the practice seems to render s45A rather redundant.
Well they serve very different purposes.
Long backlogs in the courts over the last few years mean that someone could be on remand for increasingly many months. Whilst the court determines that the offender had high level of culpability for the offence so requires a prison sentence, the prison psychiatrist recognises that their mental health has deteriorated to the point where they require inpatient admission for treatment.
I think the more interesting question is whether prison transfers are sometimes deliberately delayed in order not to “confuse” the offender’s sentence or cause delays with their conviction. That would account for the immediate transfer to hospital once the case is disposed of.
I suppose there is an argument about “subverting” the will of the court, but the only solution to that is either (a) not allowing the prisoner to be transferred out of the prison estate entirely; or (b) not allow the time in hospital to count against their sentence. Both of which seem perverse to me.
Lots of people on determinate sentences that are transferred to hospital also remain on Notional 37 orders far longer than had they just remained in prison. I think it balances out if we look at the bigger picture.
Re recalled licencees - an immediate section infers that their mental health caused the breach - in that situation I think the rationale is that it’s objectively safer to the public if they are admitted to hospital under a S.47/49 rather than a civil section.
Interesting . However I was talking about the recent practice of sentencing/recalling someone who is in hospital at the time and remains in hospital even though they receive a prison sentence not a hospital order. They are then notionally ‘transferred’ back to hospital on s47/49 on the day of their sentence. I am not a criminal lawyer but it would seem to raise questions about whether they should have received a hospital order.
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