After a Jury Convicts in England and Wales, a Crown Court Judge Sentences by Guideline Steps, in Open Court

The desk's reporting puts sentencing in the Russell Brand case on Monday, November 9, at Southwark Crown Court. Draft 01 records the verdicts, the refusal of bail and the date. Draft 35 records the appeal clocks a sentence would start. This piece covers the hearing between those two points, and only the hearing. A limit, stated plainly: this piece explains a process. It reports no sentence, predicts no sentence and weighs no outcome. Any number below belongs to the guideline machinery in general.

Sentencing after a jury conviction follows a set sequence. A hearing opens the file. A guideline sorts the offense into a category, and a starting point and range come out of that category. Aggravating and mitigating factors move the figure. Separate rules handle a guilty plea, time already served and multiple counts. Victim personal statements enter at a fixed point, for a fixed purpose. The judge then gives reasons out loud, in ordinary language.

The Hearing Opens With the File, Not a Second Trial

A sentencing hearing starts from a closed record. The trial ended with the verdicts, and the judge sentences on the facts those verdicts establish. Draft 35 carries the governing limit from the Crown Court Compendium record: where a verdict allows more than one reading and the judge can't be sure, sentence follows the reading most favorable to the defendant. Nobody re-argues the case.

The prosecution opens. Counsel summarizes the facts, puts the defendant's previous convictions before the court — the antecedent history, in the court's shorthand — and flags any guideline or statutory provision the prosecution says applies. A victim personal statement, if one exists, enters under rules covered below.

Reports may sit in the file as well. Under the Council's imposition guideline, a court considering a community or custodial sentence requests and considers a pre-sentence report before forming an opinion on sentence, unless the court considers a report unnecessary. The Probation Service prepares those reports, covering the offender's circumstances and suitability for different sentences. Whether any report sits in a given file belongs to that file, and this piece guesses at no file's contents.

Defense counsel speaks last, in mitigation: personal circumstances, any remorse, and any factor counsel asks the court to weigh downward. Each speech maps onto a later guideline step, and the judge's reasons answer them in order.

Step One Sorts the Offense Into a Category

The Sentencing Council publishes a guideline for most offenses, and courts follow the relevant guideline unless following it would run against the interests of justice. The Council's guide lays out a two-step approach to seriousness, and step one decides the category.

Step one looks at two things only: culpability and harm. The Council's wording, quoted as the Council publishes it, describes step one as an assessment of "the offender's culpability and the harm caused, or intended," by reference only to the factors each guideline lists at step one. Culpability covers the offender's level of blame. Harm covers the damage the offense caused, or meant to cause. Each guideline tailors its step-one factors to the offense.

The category matters because the category carries numbers with it. Each category holds a starting point and a category range, inside a wider offense range for the offense as a whole. A graver category holds a higher starting point. The judge finds the category first, and only then touches a figure.

Step Two Moves the Figure From Its Starting Point

Step two begins with the starting point, and the Council's guide states a fact readers often miss: a starting point "applies to all offenders irrespective of plea or previous convictions." The starting point describes the category, not the person. Personal history enters next, as adjustment. The guideline lists aggravating and mitigating factors, and the Council calls those lists non-exhaustive. Aggravating factors push the figure up from the starting point. Mitigating factors pull the figure down. The factors split into two kinds: factors tied to the context of the offense, and factors tied to the offender. Relevant previous convictions belong on the aggravating side — the Council's "How sentencing works" explainer lists a criminal record among the factors a court weighs, alongside seriousness, harm, blame and personal circumstances. Personal circumstances belong on the mitigating side, and genuine remorse can count as mitigation too — the guilty plea guideline treats remorse as a mitigating factor the court weighs separately, before any plea reduction enters the arithmetic.

The court weighs the combination, not a tally. One weighty factor can outweigh three slight ones. The adjustment can land anywhere inside the category range, and the Council's guide allows a provisional sentence outside the range in some cases.

A Guilty Plea Earns a Reduction, on a Sliding Scale

A plea reduction rewards a guilty plea, and a jury conviction involves no plea at all. The reduction therefore plays no part after a contested trial. Its mechanics still matter here, because readers meet the scale in most court reports.

The Council's guilty plea guideline sets a maximum reduction of one-third, for a plea indicated at the first stage of proceedings. After the first stage, the maximum drops to one-quarter, then slides toward one-tenth on the first day of trial, and a plea entered during a trial normally earns a further decrease, even to zero. The guideline states its purpose openly: early pleas spare victims and witnesses from testifying and save public time and money. The guideline also states a boundary in plain terms — nothing in it should pressure a defendant into pleading guilty.

Order matters. The court settles the appropriate sentence first, states the amount of any reduction, and then applies the reduction. Remorse, admissions and cooperation sit outside the scale: the guideline directs courts to weigh those as mitigation beforehand.

Time Already Served Comes Off Automatically

Credit for time on remand runs mechanically. The Crown Court Compendium, the sentencing judges' own handbook, states the rule as draft 35 records it: time spent in custody on remand counts toward a determinate or extended sentence automatically, without any direction from the judge, who holds no discretion over it. Sentencing remarks often state the day count aloud, so defendant, victims and press bench hear the same figure.

The rule covers custody under a remand order, and a separate rule covers time on a qualifying electronically monitored curfew, where the judge must give credit or explain why giving credit would prove unjust. Draft 01 records a bail refusal on the day of the verdicts in the peg case, with custody running from that day, and days after a remand count under the automatic rule in any case where a custodial sentence follows. The credit shortens time left to serve, and never changes the sentence the judge announces — conflating the two figures misreads every court report that prints both.

Multiple Counts Meet the Totality Test

A jury often convicts on several counts at once, and the court sentences for each count separately before stepping back. The Council's totality guideline governs the step back. Its first element, in the Council's published words, requires a total sentence which "reflects all the offending behaviour" before the court and stays "just and proportionate." Its second element warns against simple addition: adding notional single sentences together rarely produces a just total.

Structure carries the adjustment. Sentences can run concurrently, served at the same time, or consecutively, served one after another. The Council's totality explainer ties concurrent terms to offenses arising out of the same incident or facts, or a same-kind series, especially against the same person. The explainer ties consecutive terms to unrelated facts or incidents, and to cases where concurrent terms would fail to reflect the overall criminality, such as offenses against different people. Under a concurrent structure the lead sentence grows to reflect the associated offenses.

The test at the end stays the same under either structure. The court holds the total up against the whole offending behavior and cuts the total down if the sum overshoots a just and proportionate figure. Totality explains why a multi-count sentence often reads lower than a reader's own addition predicted.

A Victim Personal Statement Covers Impact, and Only Impact

A victim personal statement gives a victim a formal chance to say, on the record, how a crime affected them. Where a victim chose to make one, a court should consider it and take it into account before passing sentence. The court passes the sentence the court judges appropriate, having regard to the offense's and the offender's circumstances, and taking into account, so far as the court considers appropriate, the consequences for the victim.

Procedure guards the statement's use. The evidence of an offense's effects must arrive as a witness statement or an expert's report, and the defense receives the statement before sentence. The court can't build assumptions about effects on evidence the file lacks. At the court's discretion, a statement may be read aloud, in whole or in part, or summarized, with the victim's preferences weighed unless a good reason points elsewhere. A hearing won't be adjourned solely so a victim can attend to read one in person.

Two limits define the statement's weight. Making a statement belongs entirely to the victim: no pressure should be brought to bear, and no conclusion follows from a choice to make no statement. And the Council's page states the sharpest limit directly — a victim's or close relatives' opinions on what the sentence should be carry no relevance.

The Judge Gives the Reasons Out Loud, in Ordinary Language

The last step belongs to the judge alone, performed in public. The Crown Court Compendium's sentencing remarks section states the duty: an explanation must be given to the offender, in ordinary language, of the reasons for the sentence and its effect, in open court at the time sentence passes. Written reasons delivered later can't substitute. Since July 2022, the Council's explainer notes, the public can also watch live broadcasts of judges explaining their reasoning in some high-profile Crown Court hearings.

The Compendium narrows the required content. A court generally needs to identify the category each count sits in, by reference to harm and culpability; the starting point and range that follow; the adjustments for aggravating and mitigating factors; any plea credit; and the resulting sentence. Remarks also cover the purposes of sentencing under section 57 of the Sentencing Code — punishment, crime reduction, reform and rehabilitation, public protection, and reparation — with each purpose's weight varying by case.

Remarks close the sequence because remarks expose it. A judge who skipped a step or mis-stated a range hands the appeal courts a ground in the judge's own words — draft 35 covers the appeal clocks and permission stage that follow. The transcript becomes the record every later court reads.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline offers free, confidential, 24/7 support at 800-656-HOPE (4673) and Hotline.RAINN.org. In the UK, Rape Crisis's 24/7 support line is 0808 500 2222.