Offenders could be forced to show up in person for sentencing after the family of a murdered woman told ministers they wanted to confront her killer in court.
Zara Aleena’s aunt, Farah Naz, said the family wanted Jordan McSweeney to hear in person how he “completely destroyed” them but he opted not to attend his sentencing hearing in December.
After speaking with the family, the justice secretary, Dominic Raab, has pledged to explore the possibility of making offenders appear in court and increasing sentences for those who refuse.
McSweeney, 29, was given a life sentence and jailed for at least 38 years after admitting sexually assaulting and murdering 35-year-old Aleena in Ilford, east London, in June last year.
Naz said the sentencing would have been McSweeney’s opportunity to be “human” and to “face his actions”, and that his absence had been “a slap in the face”.
Naz told BBC One’s Breakfast programme: “My mother and myself, Zara’s grandmother, made victim impact statements. We wanted him to hear that. Human to human, we wanted him to know the impact that he, his actions, his atrocious, horrendous, horrific actions have left, the mark that he’s left on us, that he’s completely destroyed us as a family and we have years and years of finding a way through accepting what’s happened.”
After meeting Naz on Thursday, Raab said the Ministry of Justice was “looking carefully” at changing the law to ensure defendants could no longer hide from hearings and would have to “face up to their actions”.
He said in a statement: “This was a despicable crime and we apologise unreservedly to Zara Aleena’s family for the unacceptable failings in this case. Defendants who hide from justice can prolong the suffering of victims.”
Speaking to the BBC, Raab said making convicts appear at sentencing hearings was a “basic principle of British justice”, and that he was considering granting judges the power to impose longer terms on those who refused to appear.
His meeting with Aleena’s family is understood to have been prompted by the damning conclusions of a review into how probation staff supervised McSweeney – who had been in and out of jail since he was 16 and had a history of violence – when it emerged he was freed from prison on licence nine days before the murder. In that time, his licence had been revoked after he failed three times to meet probation officers – but he was not recalled to prison.
In the report published last month, the chief inspector of probation, Justin Russell, said McSweeney was not treated as a high-risk offender when he should have been, and that chances to return him to prison sooner were missed. It also found probation staff had huge caseloads, worsened by large-scale vacancies.
Ministers say they are putting more than £155m of additional funding into the probation system to increase staffing levels.
Aleena’s family are considering taking legal action over the failings that led to her murder, and plan to use an inquest to get the answers they need if it transpires that officials have not been honest and open with them.
