A man in Great Britain was sentenced to an indeterminate sentence in 2006. He is still imprisoned and is losing hope of ever being released, reports the British daily The Guardian.
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In 2006, Martin Myers got into an argument over a cigarette. He asked a young man if he would give him a cigarette. The man refused. Myers came from a known nomadic family. The man, Myers says, made a disparaging comment about nomads, so Myers threatened to punch him if he didn’t give him a cigarette.
The young man ran away. He then went to Luton police and told them what had happened. Police knew Myers well. He had previous convictions for dangerous driving, assault, theft and robbery. Myers was arrested, charged and convicted of attempted street robbery. On 8 March 2006, he was given a sentence – the minimum time he could serve – of 19 months and 27 days.
Myers, 42, has so far served 18 years in prison for the attempted robbery over that cigarette. He received an indeterminate sentence known as Public Protection Prison (PPI). This means that although he could be released after 19 months and 27 days, he could be jailed for up to 99 years. IPP was first used as a sentence in England and Wales in 2005, after being introduced by the Labor Party in 2003 to keep people in prison who posed a significant risk of harm to the public. It was a controversial sentence, writes the British newspaper. Critics argued that imprisoning people for what they might do, rather than what they did, contradicted a basic principle of justice: that people are innocent until proven guilty.
In September 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the indefinite detention of people serving public protection prison (PPI) beyond sentencing “is arbitrary and therefore unlawful” unless reasonable access to rehabilitation is ensured . On 3 December 2012, IPP was abolished but not for those already serving it.
More than 11 years after IPP was banned and 16 years after his sentence ended, Myers is one of almost 3,000 people incarcerated in England and Wales still serving an indeterminate sentence – with no release date on the horizon.
