Grand Chamber to deliver judgment on triple murderer and rapist, Arthur Hutchinson

The applicant, Arthur Hutchinson, is a British national who was born in 1941 and is detained in HMP Durham.

Mr Hutchinson was imprisoned in 1984 after he broke into the home of Basil and Avril Laitner and murdered them and their son, before raping one of their daughters on the evening of their other daughter’s wedding. The trial judge sentenced him to a term of life imprisonment with a recommended minimum tariff of 18 years.

In December 1994 the Secretary of State informed Mr Hutchinson that he had decided to impose a whole life term and, in May 2008, the High Court found that there was no reason for deviating from this decision given the seriousness of Mr Hutchinson’s offences.

The application was lodged with the ECtHR on 10 November 2008.

In its Chamber judgment of 3 February 2015, the court held, by six votes to one, that there had been no violation of Article 3 of the Convention. It observed in particular that, in a previous judgment of 9 July 2013, it had found that the domestic law concerning the Justice Secretary’s power to release a whole life prisoner was unclear.

In that case, the court was therefore not persuaded that the applicants’ life sentences were compatible with Article 3 and held that there had been a violation of Article 3.

However, the Court of Appeal had since explicitly addressed those doubts and held that the Secretary of State for Justice was obliged under national law to release a person detained on a whole life order where “exceptional grounds” for release could be shown to exist, and that this power of release was reviewable by the national courts.

Having regard to this clarification, the Chamber concluded that whole life orders were open to review under national law and therefore compatible with Article 3 of the Convention.

On 5 March 2015, Mr Hutchinson requested that the case be referred to the Grand Chamber under Article 43 and on 1 June 2015 the panel of the Grand Chamber accepted that request.

A Grand Chamber hearing was held in the Human Rights Building, Strasbourg, on 21 October 2015.