MAP Forum

The Solicitor General has apologised to relatives of a victim of a child sex offender, after a series of errors in the way he was sentenced meant he was not given as long a jail term as he could have been. The apology from Ellie Reeves MP came before a hearing at Bristol Crown Court, in which the judge who presided over the errors acknowledged mistakes were made, but declined to allow a review that could have seen them rectified.

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But at a new hearing today, Tuesday, October 14, the Crown Prosecution Service admitted it had wrongly directed the judge to sentence Kelvin under the guidelines for possessing indecent images of children, rather than the more serious offence of producing indecent images of children - something he did by combining one image of a child with a separate image of a different child being raped.

That is a much more serious offence, and should automatically carry a sentence of between four and nine years on its own - far more than the 12 months he was given for those particular offences.

After the sentencing hearing in August, the mother of Kelvin’s victim complained that an error had been made, and appealed to the Attorney General’s office to review the sentence given out by Judge Peter Blair as ‘unduly lenient’.

But a second error had, by then, also occurred. A clerical blunder meant that the CPS incorrectly recorded the date the sentence had been made - it was on August 16 but was wrongly registered as August 22. That meant the Attorney General’s office missed the 28-day deadline for indicating they were reviewing the case, by one day.