When in August 2016, the Attorney General’s office proudly boasted that ‘more than 100 offenders had their prison sentences lengthened’ by the Court of Appeal under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme in 2015,11 the government found no space to mention, for balance, that over roughly the same period nearly ten times as many sentences (997) were reduced by the Court of Appeal as manifestly excessive or unlawful.
