---

Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, I rise briefly simply so that there should be some voice other than the voice of the law in favour of this extremely important and subtle amendment. The law must be seen to be just. I have just been reading the life of Lord Denning. His perpetual insistence on the aim of a trial, the aim of the court and the aim of the judge being to see that justice is done to the defendant seems to me to be of enormous importance. It cannot be seen by ordinary people who are not lawyers to be just if crimes such as mercy killings or deeply regretted killings undertaken in the heat of battle should be treated in the same way as completely different, malicious, evil and probably self-seeking killings at the other end of the spectrum. Even though the concept of a life sentence is absurd because it is not normally a sentence for life, the ordinary public, of whom the jury is composed, do not like this farce and the manifest injustice of treating different cases as though they were the same.