Laura Farris says new laws announced today will ensure abusers face tougher penalties for killing their partners.
The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Home Office and MoJ told GB News: “Since I've been an MP, but also in the years leading up to 2019, when I was first elected, there were a number of quite high profile cases where the victim was killed by their partner.
“And in some cases we’d see a derisory sentence based on the fact that they later claimed they hadn't intended to do it, and they didn't intend that level of harm. And when we passed the Domestic Abuse Act in 2021, we created a new offence of non fatal strangulation that carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison. And in one of these cases, the person killed his partner. He got four years and eight months, and I was gravely worried about that.
“I pushed on this because I thought that in this really serious, very gender specific area of offending we weren't punishing perpetrators seriously enough. Now they'll get tougher sentences than ever before now. So we're changing the law to ensure people who kill their partner through degrading forms of sexual conduct get tougher sentences.'
Ms Farris also said the Government was winning the battle to reduce backlogs in our courts.
She said: “We are very focused on the court backlog but it is just worth saying one of the reasons why we have a serious backlog is because of COVID and because we took a difficult decision to keep going with jury trials throughout the pandemic.
“And we did that because we saw that as the cornerstone of the right to a fair trial. And if you look, 90% of all criminal cases are actually dealt with in the Magistrates courts where we've almost completely eliminated the backlog. In the Crown Court, yes, there is a backlog but it's stabilised now and we're doing everything we can to bring it down.
“We’ve done three things. So first, we're well on track to recruiting additional judges. The second thing we're doing is keeping nightingale courts open, which you will recall were the emergency courts that were opened during the pandemic. So we have extra capacity for the system. And the third thing we're doing is we're giving extra financial support to the solicitors and barristers who appear in these cases who prosecute and defend. We've given them a 15% increase in their fees. That's up to 144 million extra in the legal aid system. So all of this is designed to improve the system and to get the backlog down to where it was before the pandemic.”
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