There are sentencings for murders every week around the country, but hardly any are deemed important enough to livestream from the courtroom. But the felling of the Sycamore Gap was an exception.
When Mrs Justice Lambert jailed Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers for more than four years this week, her remarks were livestreamed around the world.
Aside from the Lucy Letby case, it’s hard to think of a British crime that has captured the public’s imagination so vividly in recent years. In the last week, Sarah Dodd, a legal expert at Tree Law, has been invited onto BBC Radio 5 Live, a radio show in Canada, and for an interview with a French newspaper.
There are a myriad of reasons why trees are important, but Sarah thinks things like ancestry, symbolism, and political history can hold particular significance. The struggle when trying to sentence two men for a ‘moronic mission’, is how things like that are quantified. In the end, as Sarah explained, the court relied on a system first introduced in 2003 by the London Tree Officers Association to measure the amenity value of trees in urban environments.
The CAVAT system, as Sarah explained in layman’s terms, involves the rudimentary circumference measurement, the location value, the future life span, the functional crown value (encompassing things like canopy fullness), and working out how many people actually see it. These are among the things thrown into a clever spreadsheet, out of which pops a number.
The problem with CAVAT and other systems, Sarah argues, is: “None of those are suitable for valuing criminal damage to a tree, or a civil claim, it’s always a square peg in a round hole.” The CAVAT system was not designed for high-profile criminal cases, and the subjective elements mean different people will come to different valuations of the tree, as was the case at Newcastle Crown Court.
The prosecution opened the case at no more than £620,000, then later revised this down to £458,000 on the day of sentence. Graham’s defence team argued it was much less, at no more than £150,000. With three wildly different numbers, the judge concluded the estimated financial value did not really matter as long as it was over £5,000.
Why £5000? This is the benchmark needed to prosecute the charge of ‘criminal damage exceeding £5,000’. This was important, because the sentencing powers are much stronger, with a maximum of 10 years, versus three months for anything below five thousand. Had the pair only been prosecuted for damaging Hadrian’s Wall (valued at £1,114), they might have avoided jail altogether.
In any case, Judge Lambert said the true valuation of the more than hundred-year-old national treasure did not really matter, as they had already crossed the threshold for the offence. Instead she lingered more on the ‘social impact of the offence’, a specific marker identified by the Sentencing Council when placing a crime in the highest category of harm, but arguably even harder to quantify than price.
This is where victim impact statements come in. When sentencing a rapist, judges do not always need to hear expert medical evidence when deciding if a survivor has suffered extreme psychological harm (as opposed to severe). Judges can use their discretion in response to the strength of a victim impact statement, and the presentation of the victim at trial.
Likewise, in this case Mrs Justice Lambert heard a powerful victim impact statement from a National Trust Manager Andrew Poad, who shared some of the heartbroken responses sent by email from people across the world who found significance or made memories from the Sycamore Gap.
“This iconic tree can never be replaced,” he told the court,“Whilst the National Trust has cared for it on behalf of the nation, it belonged to the people. It was totemic… An overwhelming sense of loss and confusion was felt across the world. The question was why anyone would do this to such a beautiful tree in such a special place. It was beyond comprehension.”
‘I was on the edge of my seat’
Sarah believes the victim impact played a large part in the decision to hand out a four year sentence for felling the tree (which is right at the top of the category range for a high harm high culpability offence), but she was not surprised when the judge failed to go any further, staying within the sentencing guidelines (the total sentence went beyond four years because it reflected the damage to Hadrian’s Wall too).
Asked why an exceptional case, that upset so many people, did not inspire the judge to dish out a sentence outside the guideline and towards the 10 year maximum, Sarah said: “I think it was already an exceptional case. It was already exceptional because the police had investigated it. Because it has passed the public interest test for prosecution.
“It had been pursued at great expense. I can’t even imagine the legal costs to get it to trial with the team of people that were there. It already had a significant amount of press attention. The judge had said she would already agree to the sentencing being televised, which is incredibly rare.
“I think there was already quite a bit of social feeling a sentence of four years or so would be quite harsh, when compared with sentences for other crimes. Perhaps in a situation that had already been quite exceptional, it was a sound move by the judge to stay within the sentencing guidelines.
“I was on the edge of my seat thinking, is she going to do it. Is she going to step away from them. But she didn’t and it didn’t surprise me. I think it would have been quite surprising had she deviated from them.
“I left the sentencing feeling like there were absolutely no winners here. You got to hear a lot about their backgrounds and that was pretty traumatic. The whole situation was traumatic. The financial loss to the National Trust. The loss to all of us of the tree. The cost of running the trial. The cost of putting them in prison. I just left feeling flat.”
When BBC News presenter Huw Edwards was convicted of possessing indecent images of children – vile recordings of real children being sexually abused – he was sentenced to six months in prison suspended for two years. It’s punishments like this, that have left some befuddled by how justice is meted out. The prosecution has ‘thrown up huge questions’ Sarah said.
“Ultimately, humans won’t survive on earth unless we protect nature. We will extinct ourselves. So looking on that basis, trees should have an extreme amount of protection, but in the brutal cold light of day, when there’s a child abuse case and a tree felling case, it just looks disjointed if someone felling a tree gets a longer sentence than someone convicted of child abuse.”
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