The Court of Appeal has increased the sentence handed to two teenage boys convicted of raping two girls in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, replacing a three-year youth rehabilitation order with four years’ detention, after Attorney-General Lord Hermer referred the case under the unduly lenient sentence scheme.
Lady Chief Justice Sue Carr, sitting with two other judges, ruled that the sentencing judge, Nicholas Rowland at Southampton Crown Court, had undervalued the seriousness of the offending when he imposed the original community-based order in May.
The court also extended a restraining order protecting the victims from ten years to a lifetime ban. A third defendant, sentenced separately for a lesser role, had his sentence upheld as not unduly lenient.
For criminal law practitioners, the message is direct: a non-custodial youth sentence is no longer safe from reversal once a case draws political and public attention.
Tom Little KC, representing the Attorney-General, successfully argued that the original judge had misapplied the welfare-first sentencing principles that govern child offenders, a submission the Court of Appeal accepted in full.
The case also drew scrutiny over how it was reported: the Crown Prosecution Service later corrected its own sentencing press release after an earlier version wrongly characterised one attack as having occurred at knife-point, a claim the judge had found, as a matter of fact, not to be true. The Attorney-General’s referral proceeded independently of that correction.
The ruling lands amid a wider policy debate. Justice Secretary David Lammy has proposed reforms intended to intervene earlier and reduce reliance on custody, while former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has publicly criticised the leniency of the original sentence.
Practitioners advising young clients still work within a framework that treats custody as a last resort. But prosecutors deciding whether to seek an Attorney-General referral now have a live example of a sentence overturned largely because of public reaction to it, not a change in the guidelines themselves.
Defence advisers in youth cases now need to plan for appeal risk at the point of sentencing, not after it. A three-year youth rehabilitation order looked final in May; by July it had become four years’ detention, on the same facts, because the Attorney-General judged the original sentence unduly lenient.
Barristers briefed in youth courts should expect this case to be cited on both sides of custody-versus-rehabilitation arguments, and should set client expectations accordingly: a lenient-looking result at first instance is no longer safe to treat as the end of the matter.