Ellie Gould was only 17 when ex-boyfriend, Thomas Griffiths, strangled her and stabbed her 13 times with a knife found in the kitchen of her family home. She had ended the relationship the day before. Poppy Devey Waterhouse was 24 years old when she was killed by her ex boyfriend Joe Atkinson in 2018 at the flat they shared. Coming home in the early hours after a night out, he stabbed her with a kitchen knife 49 times, and left her with more than 100 injuries. Griffiths was sentenced to a minimum term of 12.5 years, Atkinson to a minimum term of 15 years and 310 days.
Legally, there is nothing wrong with those sentences. However, many - not least the families of the young victims - would no doubt consider that they fail to reflect the seriousness of the offences concerned. Contrast them with, for example, the sentence of 27 years imposed on Rasheed Rahman in September this year for inflicting a single, fatal stab wound on Mark Carroll in an unprovoked attack in a park in north London, and any sense that Griffiths and Atkinson were dealt with too lightly may well increase.
There are obvious caveats to what iCan you s undeniably a vast disparity in sentence: in the Rahman case, no credit was available as he was found guilty after trial, and he was over 18 at the time of the offence (unlike 17-year-old Thomas Griffiths, for whom the appropriate starting point in determining the minimum term would have been 12 years). Even so, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the law undervalues the lives of female victims, and fails to appreciate the brutality and cruelty of the manner of their deaths - and, more often than not, of the treatment they received at the hands of their killers in the months or years prior.
The current law
Minimum terms in relation to sentences for murder are prescribed by Schedule 21 of the Sentencing Act 2020. The ‘basic’ minimum term, for an offence which did not involve any of the aggravating elements set out in paragraphs 2 (factors which render the offence “exceptionally” serious and therefore warranting a ‘whole life’ order), 3 (factors which warrant a minimum term of 30 years, including the use of a firearm or explosive) or 4 (taking a knife or other weapon to the scene of the murder, which warrants an uplift on the minimum term to 25 years), is 15 years for an adult.
The current law relating to minimum tariffs has developed over time, and often in response to public pressure. Schedule 21 reflects the particular need to deter certain ‘types’ of killing in the public interest. For example, the killing of a police officer warrants a higher starting point. The increased starting point for murders involving knives and other weapons brought to the scene is a direct result of campaigning by the family of Ben Kinsella, who was 16 when he was stabbed to death in the street in 2008 by three older teenagers.
One effect of the way in which the law has developed - or, rather, failed to develop - is the following significant anomaly: an individual who brings a knife to the scene of a street murder, intending to commit any offence with it, or to have it available to use as a weapon, and who goes on to use that knife or other weapon to commit the murder, can expect to serve a minimum sentence of 25 years. By contrast, an individual who kills a partner or ex-partner at home – perhaps as a culmination of years of violence and other abuse, perhaps as the victim tries to leave the perpetrator - using a knife or other weapon that was already present in the home, will be sentenced on the basis of a 15-year starting point.
The Government’s June 2026 announcement
That “absurd” (as the Centre for Women’s Justice puts it) 10-year disparity was the focus of an announcement by the Ministry of Justice [MoJ] at the end of June this year. In the final days of Keir Starmer’s tenure as prime minister, the MoJ announced that it intends to increase the minimum term for offenders who kill a partner or ex-partner at home with a knife or other weapon.
Announcing the intended change, then-Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said that closing that 10-year gap was a means of ensuring that those who murder in a domestic context face sentences that “better reflect the devastating harm they cause”. No immediate change to the sentencing regime can be expected: any increase in minimum term is subject to consultation with the Sentencing Council and will be introduced "as soon as possible”.
But is increasing the minimum tariff the best approach to ensuring that the harm suffered by victims of coercive control and other forms of domestic abuse is properly reflected in the sentences handed down to their killers?
The government’s announcement was made against a background of ongoing consideration of how homicide law can be improved to reflect a modern understanding of the effects of domestic abuse. It is a question the Law Commission is currently grappling with. Meanwhile, several stakeholders have voiced their fundamental opposition to such a change, fearing the unintended consequence of further punishing victims of abuse who kill as an act of self-preservation. There are calls instead to apply the statutory aggravating and mitigating factors that have recently been introduced to the current sentencing framework to facilitate a significant increase from the 15-year starting point where there was a history of coercive control by the perpetrator (or a significant reduction where the perpetrator has been a victim of coercive control by the deceased), and/or other factors such as overkill, strangulation and the fact that the murder took place at the end of a relationship.
However, for Killed Women - the campaign group headed by the mothers of Ellie Gould, Poppy Devey Waterhouse and Megan Newborough (who was brutally murdered by her partner in 2021) - the MoJ’s announcement was cause for profound relief. They have campaigned for seven years on this very issue. Other organisations similarly laud the announcement as a crucial step towards improved justice for victims of domestic homicide.
Clare Wade KC’s Domestic Homicide Sentencing Review
A notable contribution to the debate is Clare Wade KC’s Domestic Homicide Sentencing Review, commissioned by the government in 2021 and published in March 2023. The Review acknowledged the calls for an increase in the starting point for domestic murder involving a weapon. However, it concluded that the anomaly created by different starting points being dependent on whether a weapon was brought to the scene, or found there, is best addressed independently of consideration of paragraph 4 of Schedule 21 (the paragraph that prescribes a 25-year starting point where a knife is taken to the scene). This is because the harms in domestic murders are very different to those contemplated by paragraph 4, which is intended to discourage young people from carrying and using knives on the streets. To compare like with like privileges factors such as the carrying of a weapon at the expense of other factors attributable to domestic abuse and misogyny.
Clare Wade KC recommended that provision should be made to disapply paragraph 4 in the context of domestic murders. The effect would be that, irrespective of whether or not the murder weapon had been brought to the scene with intent, all domestic murders would have a starting point of 15 years (unless other particular circumstances of the murder mean they qualify for the 30-year starting point or the Whole Life Order starting point or the perpetrator is a child). She also recommended that the applicable statutory aggravating and mitigating factors should be updated to enable the specific harms of domestic murder to be reflected in sentences and that the coercive control model be used to ascribe a level of seriousness to a murder. She recommended the addition of specific aggravating factors reflecting the gendered circumstances of a domestic killing, such as killing at the end of a relationship, jealousy, and strangulation as the method of killing.
Following the Clare Wade KC Review, the government moved to introduce overkill and coercive control to the list of statutory aggravating (and mitigating, in the case of coercive control by the deceased on the offender) factors under Schedule 21. However, it rejected the recommendation that paragraph 4 be disapplied in cases of domestic murder. The government’s view was that this would result in an unjust disparity in the way the sentencing framework responds to murders where a weapon used has been taken to the scene with intent, depending on the nature of the connection between the victim and the perpetrator.
Victims of domestic abuse who kill their abusers
The MoJ insists that the proposed change, which forms part of the government’s commitment to halve violence against women and girls by 2035, will also include safeguards to ensure that the existing 15-year starting point will continue to apply to victims of domestic abuse who kill their abusers.
What those safeguards will look like is not yet clear. But would any statutory safeguard be sufficient to safeguard female defendants in a system which appears to routinely disregard or fail to understand the impact - or even the existence - of a background of domestic abuse by the deceased?
CWJ, which routinely represents women at appeal following conviction, reports that female defendants’ accounts of abuse are often disbelieved or minimised. In many cases, there is no documentary or witness evidence of the abuse. Many women struggle with disclosure particularly where the abuse had a sexual element or where the degree of control is such that there was simply no opportunity to disclose to third parties. Sometimes vital evidence - to use a specific example, custody photographs of bruising injuries to the defendant’s neck as a result of strangulation by the deceased immediately prior to the killing - is simply, for whatever reason, not disclosed by the police.
However it transpires, that absence of contemporaneous evidence often undermines the defendant’s account at trial. According to CWJ’s research, only 7% of female victims of domestic violence who rely on self-defence succeed in that defence - potentially because the jury deems the use of a weapon a disproportionate response to the threat faced. Underpinning all of this is a lack of understanding, across the legal professions, around the concept of coercive control. There have been several calls for training for all lawyers and judges within the CJS on understanding and applying the concept of coercive control to assist with the sentencing process in cases of women who kill their abusers.
Creating further disparities
The anticipated increase in minimum term will specifically apply to offenders who kill their partner or ex-partner. It seeks to address a stark disparity in sentencing, but in doing so it risks creating new disparities. There are other forms of femicide which would continue to warrant a 15-year starting point. The increase will not apply when a victim is killed by a family member, for example, when a parent is killed by their child or someone is a victim of so-called ‘honour’ based killing by a relative. Nor will the change apply to killings committed by perpetrators known to a victim but with whom they were not in a relationship.
Even where the victim was, or had been, in a relationship with her killer, there will also be a disparity in sentence depending on whether she was stabbed to death at home or whether she was strangled or beaten. Strangulation is a common method employed in this context.
Conclusion
The lower sentences presently meted out to those who kill their partners at home - simply because they used a weapon found at the scene - clearly create a cruel and arbitrary disparity that must be addressed. It should not be forgotten these are often brutal attacks, punctuated by a background of coercive control and abuse. Sentences should properly reflect that.
The MoJ’s announcement is a direct response to the calls of groups like Killed Women, who have courageously campaigned on this issue for many years. And for those who must face the daily reality that the State considers their loved one’s killer less culpable than someone who, for example, delivers a single stab wound in the context of a fight in the street, there is no doubt that the MoJ’s announcement represents a moment of profound catharsis.
However, despite its doubtless honourable intentions, the MoJ’s latest proposed amendment to Schedule 21 flies in the face of expert advice and evidence, pre-empts the Law Commission’s conclusions in the context of its ongoing consideration of reforms to homicide law, and promises to bring a host of unintended and unwanted consequences.
Rather than a blanket increase, the recommendations of the likes of Clare Wade KC and CWJ - if taken up as a comprehensive package, as they are intended to be - would allow for greater tailoring of the sentence to the factual pattern, ensuring an appropriate sentence through the cumulative application of relevant aggravating factors that properly reflect the harms of domestic violence.
The disparity in sentence depending on whether a knife was brought to or found at the scene has come about by the piecemeal, reactive changes Schedule 21 has undergone over the years. Another reactive amendment to Schedule 21 is not the answer. Instead, the time has come for root and branch reform of Schedule 21 to ensure it no longer fails women.
Copyright & permissions
.png&w=3840&q=60)
.jpg&w=3840&q=60)
