I mentioned something in this week's show about the average sentence for Dangerous Driving in the UK being more like 10 to 11 months than the 12 weeks that Lord Ahmed received.

So I thought I'd better back that up.

If you are so inclined you can go searching on the web and find the following document (links to a PDF):

"the Sentence THE SENTENCING GUIDELINES NEWSLETTER January 2006"

If one has a bit of a rummage around in that august journal one finds the following table:

It would appear to me, from this, that Lord Nazir Ahmed got off rather lightly. If one actually reads the complete document one finds there is a different rate for Crown Court and Magistrate Courts. Lord Ahmed was due to be sentenced in a Magistrate's Court but sentencing was moved to the Crown Court. Even this, however, says that if given a custodial sentence in a Magistrate's Court, it should have been longer than 12 weeks.  

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