5 IPP Prisoners Get Second Chance at Freedom in UK

A UK justice watchdog just opened the door to freedom for five men who've spent years trapped in a prison system even the United Nations called "psychological torture."

The Criminal Cases Review Commission announced it's sending five cases to appeals courts, all involving people who received Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences as teenagers or young adults. These controversial sentences had no end date, leaving prisoners in legal limbo even after serving their minimum terms.

IPP sentences were abolished in 2012, but the change didn't help the thousands already serving them. Some prisoners have spent 22 times longer behind bars than their original sentence. Many were teenagers when they were first locked up.

The breakthrough came after recent appeals court victories showed judges had failed to properly consider defendants' young age and immaturity. Leighton Williams spent almost 16 years behind bars for a drunken fight at age 19. His original minimum sentence was just 30 months. Last year, appeals judges finally freed him at age 36, ruling the original judge had made mistakes.

The five new cases include Benjamin Hibbert, who was just 15 or 16 when convicted, and Luke Ings, sentenced at 17 for a fight at McDonald's. Jay Davis received an IPP sentence for possessing a firearm at 19, with a minimum term of only nine months.

The Ripple Effect

The commission now receives about 16 similar cases every month and has 110 more under review. They're even searching through older rejected cases to see if recent court decisions might help those prisoners too.

Dame Vera Baird, who chairs the commission, assembled a special team with focused expertise to handle these cases. For the first time in years, people serving these abolished sentences have real hope of getting out.

The recent court victories set important legal precedents about how judges should have treated young offenders differently. Those rulings are now creating pathways to freedom for others who were in similar situations.

Anyone still serving an IPP or DPP sentence who was young at the time of their conviction can now contact the commission for help, as long as they've already tried appealing through normal channels.

Justice is finally catching up to a system the UN condemned, one case at a time.