As the USA
experience has shown, that virtually unfettered power of the Crown, leveraged with mandatory minimum sentences, in many situations renders both the
right to a trial and the role of the judiciary in sentencing proceedings largely
irrelevant.
Either judges had never visited penal institutions, or their
experience was so far in the past that it was simply
irrelevant to comprehending the complexities of contemporary understandings of human
rights in prisons and penitentiaries.