Government of Jersey

Sentencing resulting in a custodial sentence 2020 to 2023 (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by Government of Jersey and published on 20 March 2025.
Prepared internally, no external costs.

Request 690604800

Please provide figures of the Magistrate Court and Royal Court sentencing outcomes that resulted in custodial sentences in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020.

Response

In 2023 the Magistrate’s Court handed down custodial sentences to 48 defendants.

Prior to this, sentencing outcome data was not captured in a way that allows statistics to be produced other than by manually searching all cases dealt with by the Magistrate’s Court, individually. This would significantly exceed the cost allowed under the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014. Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 therefore partly applies.

In respect of the Royal Court, Article 23 applies. The outcome of each judgment is published on the Jersey Law website. Instructions to access these are as follows:

1. Judgments of the Royal Court may be searched from this page - All judgments.

2. Using the “Judgments – sub-menu” select “Unreported judgments”. This lists all Unreported judgments. Filters on the left-hand side include a drop down for “Hearing type”.

3. Filter the list by Hearing type “Sentencing (Criminal)” to select all Unreported judgments for criminal sentencing.

4. Then use the Date range From and To filter settings to select the particular year of interest – e.g. From 01/01/2023 to 31/12/2023 to select all criminal sentencing unreported judgments for 2023.

5. One can then open each judgment to determine whether a custodial sentence was handed down.

Articles applied

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Article 23 - Information accessible to applicant by other means

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge.

(2) A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain the information.