The Minister for Justice has said that he would "require a lot of persuading" on the removal of the life sentence for murder.
Speaking before the publication yesterday of the Law Reform Commission (LRC) report on homicide, Brian Lenihan said that he would read and consider the report very, very carefully.
One of the LRC recommendations is the expansion of the definition of murder to take in a reckless and extreme indifference to human life, and removal of the mandatory life sentence to allow the exercise of judicial discretion.
"A life sentence for a life gives a very important message," Mr Lenihan said. "While I know many do not serve a life sentence, it allows the offender to focus on rehabilitation and remorse. It marks the fact that a life has been lost."
Speaking at the launching of the report yesterday, Mr Justice Peter Charleton said that, arguably, if we changed the definition of murder, then the life sentence must be changed. The LRC was proposing to add to the definition of murder those who kill someone when they act recklessly, with an extreme indifference to human life. The ultimate moral turpitude was the intention to kill, and if you changed that, you had to change the sentence, he remarked.
Mr Justice Charleton noted there were cases where a gang savagely beat the elderly in their own homes and left them to die, resulting in a manslaughter conviction. Leaving someone to die in this way was a grave wrong, and the result of viciousness or thoughtlessness in the aftermath of a serious crime, but it was not necessarily the ultimate wrong of intending death or serious harm.
Placing a bomb in a crowded train or pub were circumstances with which communities throughout Europe had had to contend, and many such cases were outside the definition of murder as it now stood, he added.
He said the recommendations would bring Irish law more closely into line with European practice and might accord more closely with what ordinary people thought murder should be.
The LRC report recommended that, as well as abolishing the mandatory life sentence for murder, the two new offences of assault causing death and dangerous driving causing death be created.