what can you get a life sentence for in the uk
Life imprisonment in England and Wales The whole life order (formerly a whole life tariff) is a court order whereby a prisoner who is being sentenced to life imprisonment is ordered to serve that sentence without any possibility of parole or conditional release. This order may be made in cases of aggravated murders committed by anyone who was aged 21 or above at the time of the crime. The purpose of a whole life order is for a prisoner to be kept in prison until he or she dies with almost no chance of eventual release, although parole can be granted in exceptional circumstances. A prisoner can still be released by the Home Secretary on compassionate grounds such as great age, injury, disability or ill health; which has also seen several life sentence prisoners being granted early release a considerable length of time before the date when they could first apply for parole. A whole life tariff can also be quashed on appeal by the Court of Appeal; a number of prisoners have had their sentences reduced by this method. From 1983, the Home Secretary had the right to decide how long a life sentence prisoner should serve before being considered for parole, and the trial judge was not obliged to recommend when or if an offender should be considered for parole. In some cases, the trial judge had recommended that a life sentence prisoner should at some point be considered for parole, only for the Home Secretary to later impose a whole life tariff; this happened in a number of cases involving prisoners who had been sentenced to life imprisonment before or after 1983.