Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

It is chaired by Mrs. Justice Denham and includes Mr. Justice Kevin O'Higgins, Mr. Justice Esmonde Smith, Her Honour Judge Miriam Malone and Professor Tom O'Malley. They are reviewing sentencing systems worldwide and have decided to establish a pilot project in the Dublin Circuit Court. I understand that two researchers have been selected to collect and collate information on sentencing outcomes in cases on indictment in designated courts, in accordance with criteria specified by the committee. The objectives of that project are to identify criteria and other information employed by the Judiciary in sentencing for particular types of offence in criminal proceedings; to record and retrieve such information in individual cases; to design and develop a database to store the information retrieved and to enable its retrieval in accordance with various search criteria; to share or disseminate the information utilising information or communications technology via a judge's intranet or other means; and to assemble appropriate material on sentencing for a bench book and website. That work is ongoing and, in fairness, I should acknowledge that it is a judge-led initiative in this area.

Deputy Jim O'Keeffe's proposal is an elaborate one, but I hope he will not mind me saying that I think it is overly ambitious at this stage. It would require a vast amount of work to be done concerning every offence in every court. The case number of the offence and the particular offence could be done on a computer, but it would take a lot of work by officials to put down any mitigating factors relied on by the convicted person or his or her defence counsel. They would have to listen to and note the arguments and put them down in some written form. They would also have to put down the person's previous convictions as well as details of the offence. They would have to follow it up by dealing with the Prison Service to find out if the sentence was served or if early releases occurred. Such things would be extremely complicated to do. It may be that in a perfect world there would be sufficient human resources to deal with such matters, but at the moment I cannot honestly accept the amendment because I could never implement its provisions within existing resources. Members of the Judiciary would probably have to spend a lot of their time inputting this material, otherwise registrars or specially appointed court officials would have to do this kind of work.

I fully accept what Deputy Jim O'Keeffe said, that the purpose of this proposal is to give people a picture of what is going on in the courts. However, if it is not an accurate picture it will be misleading. One cannot just establish it and allow it to tick over, otherwise the media would draw inaccurate or incomplete pictures from the relevant data. We must ask ourselves whether what the Courts Service and the Judiciary have done is more promising than what Deputy Jim O'Keeffe is doing. I tend to think that it is, in terms of giving us a statistical knowledge of what is going on. The Deputy's proposal is not really worthwhile, unless he has some strong objection.

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