Jerry Tolbert was just 14 when he used an imitation firearm to rob someone of their mobile phone, a silver Nokia 6280 worth £190, in what was described during his 2007 trial as an “unremarkable but serious” crime.
But despite his age and the nature of the offence, the judge decided the child in the dock, then still only 15, was dangerous and sentenced him to a draconian indefinite jail term, which has since been abolished from the statute books.
Two decades later, Tolbert was still in custody – until the Court of Appeal this year ruled the punishment was “obviously wrong”.
“It would appear that Tolbert was sentenced to, in effect, a life sentence by a judge who did not appreciate that he was dealing with a 15 year old defendant,” a panel of judges led by Lord Justice Edis said in a scathing judgment, which concluded the sentencing process was “unacceptable and the result has been unjust”.
Tolbert’s case is one of six imprisonment for public protection (IPP) and the youth equivalent, detention for public protection (DPP) jail terms, quashed in the sweeping ruling because the courts had failed to take into account the offenders’ age and immaturity.
Another, Jay Davis, had served the best part of 20 years in custody for threatening someone with a pellet gun aged 19. He should have received an 18-month determinate sentence, the Court of Appeal found.
His case had been flagged by the country's miscarriages of justice watchdog, Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which is now reviewing more than 180 similar cases – with more applications arriving every week.
Its chair, Dame Vera Baird, believes it is time that the government takes "wholesale" action to review or resentence those still serving the controversial jail terms.
“I think we are increasingly seeing that a lot of men who were sentenced when young have had terrible miscarriage of justice imposed upon them,” she told *The Independent. *
This week, new prime minister Andy Burnham announced his government would do just that – ordering a review of the jail terms as a way of tackling Britain’s prison crisis and freeing up much-needed space in Britain’s overcrowded jails.
The move was welcomed by former Lord Chief Justice John Thomas, who said the sentences were a “stain” on the justice system, while Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti said Mr Burnham’s intervention would offer “hope to the hopeless”.
Dame Vera welcomed the move but called for the CCRC, which she said was “referring as many [cases] as we can as quickly as we can” to the Court of Appeal, to be involved in the review.
The open-ended sentences – which The Independent has campaigned for more than two years to have reviewed – were outlawed in 2012, but not retrospectively. Introduced under New Labour in a bid to be tough on crime, they were handed to many repeat offenders, even if their crimes were minor. The idea was that criminals would only be released when they could prove to a Parole Board that they no longer posed a risk to the public.
Over 2,700 under-25s, including 1,495 under-21s, 17 children under 14, and even a 10-year-old were among those who found themselves locked up without a release date.
Some 14 years after the sentence was recognised as a mistake, almost 2,400 IPP and DPP prisoners remain incarcerated. Some have served up to 22 times their original minimum term, while others are in a vicious cycle of recall, often for breaches of strict licence conditions.
But campaigners the United Group for the Reform of IPP (UNGRIPP) say the growing numbers of sentences now being quashed “exposes a devastating reality: an entire generation of young people was written off by the state”.
Dame Vera, who was appointed as chair of the CCRC last summer, was a Labour MP for Redcar when the sentences were first introduced in 2005. Even then, she thought the project was a “risky manoeuvre”.
“But who could expect that it would last this long and cause so much damage, which I'm afraid it has done,” she added. “It's very odd that we're left over with a lot of people are still stuck on something that we all accept should never have been implemented.”
Despite 96 prisoners taking their own lives in custody after losing hope of ever getting out, successive governments have resisted calls to resentence those still on the jail term.
But a landmark ruling in the case of Leighton Williams, who served nearly 16 years over a drunken fight aged 19, has opened the floodgates. The appeal court ruled a previous offence committed when was 17 had been wrongly counted against him and his IPP sentence was quashed in 2024. Following his release, he told The Independent the unjust jail term had robbed him of 16 formative years.
Since then, a flurry of cases have been referred to the Court of Appeal and overturned, including Haroon Ahmed, who spent 18 years being punished for a knifepoint robbery of a service station committed when he was 19.
After it was quashed last year, he compared the plight of IPP prisoners to “hostages”, adding: “We have grown from teenagers to men, and we are watching people with much worse offending come to custody and be released.”
The CCRC now has a dedicated team examining applications from IPP and DPP prisoners. Recently, it referred its 11th case this year to the appeal courts.
But – even with a streamlined process – progress is slow and revisiting every outstanding case would “take another CCRC”, Dame Vera admitted.
“The more we take notice of IPPs and the more we refer IPPs, the more IPPs we get sent in to us for review,” she said.
“I think really something far more wholesale needs to be done than this kind of pedalling along on a slow bicycle.”
In 2022, the cross-party justice committee inquiry found the sentences were “irredeemably flawed” and called for all IPP prisoners to be resentenced. Former Lord Chief Justice, Lord John Thomas, has also taken up the issue, urging parliamentarians to give prisoners a release date in a major report produced with the Howard League.
And in a damning statement last month, the UN condemned the detention of UK prisoners trapped on IPP terms as “arbitrary” and accused the British government of presiding over a form of psychological torture.
In a scathing 16-page document, the Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said the sentences amounted to “inhumane treatment” due to the “mental anguish of being subjected to continuous uncertainty of a release date”.
Dame Vera, a former victims’ commissioner, said she was not surprised the UN was looking at the scandal, adding it is time for each case to be reviewed “systematically and individually” while ensuring the public is protected.
“Literally, some of these guys don't know they're ever going to get out for what they did,” she said.
“Fundamentally, the government accepted long ago that these were unwise sentences,” she added. “So, if the government has said these are bad sentences, surely it needs to devise a way of getting those who are left over off them.”
An UNGRIPP spokesperson welcomed Mr Burnham’s review but said they “have heard promises of action and reform before, only to see meaningful change delayed or fail to materialise”.
They called for an urgent resentencing exercise, adding: “The government cannot continue to outsource its moral responsibility to an under-resourced court system. We need urgent, state-led action through a proper resentencing exercise to finally give these written off young adults their lives back.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “It is right that IPP sentences were abolished. The decision to quash individual sentences is a matter for the courts.
"While public protection is our number one priority, we are working with organisations and campaign groups to support those still serving these sentences, including through access to mental health support and rehabilitation programmes.”