The aunt of Zara Aleena has called for the law to be changed after her niece’s murderer won an appeal to reduce the minimum term of his life sentence.
Farah Naz said her family were “extremely disappointed” by the court of appeal’s decision to reduce Jordan McSweeney’s minimum prison term from 38 to 33 years and questioned why the sentencing judge had been overruled by review judges.
McSweeney sexually assaulted and murdered Aleena, a 35-year-old law graduate, as she walked home from a night out in Ilford, east London, in the early hours of 26 June 2022.
He refused to attend his sentencing hearing last December, where he was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 38 years by Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb at the Old Bailey.
In a ruling on Friday, three judges at the appeal court reduced McSweeney’s minimum prison term to 33 years, finding the original sentence was “manifestly excessive”.
Naz said the reduction sent a “disheartening” message to women that their “suffering will not be accounted for”.
She told BBC Breakfast on Saturday : “He spat in the face of the law, gets the law to stand up for him and he’s able to exercise his right – surely somebody who has such a disdain for law should not be given that right of appeal.
“We need to change this law. I am extremely angry.”
During the hearing on Friday, which McSweeney attended via video link from prison, the lady chief justice, Lady Carr, said: “Having correctly found that Ms Aleena must have been rendered unconscious at an early stage in the attack, the judge had lacked a sufficient evidential basis on which to be sure that there had been additional mental or physical suffering such as to justify an increase in the 30-year starting point.”
In a 12-page judgment published on Friday, Lady Carr, sitting with Mrs Justice McGowan and Mrs Justice Ellenbogen, said the “sexual nature” of the attack had already doubled the starting point of the sentence from 15 to 30 years.
She later said the conclusion that McSweeney took Aleena’s phone to stop her calling for help was “not justified” and should not have increased his sentence.
The senior judge noted the minimum term only determined when an offender became eligible to be considered for release by the Parole Board and they “will not necessarily be released at the end of that term, or at any time after that”.
Naz said she understood that the ruling appeared to “align with an established legal sentencing framework”, but criticised the overruling of the sentencing judge by review judges.
