The Sunday Telegraph - 11.08.2019

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Letters 19

Features & Arts 21

Weather 29

TV listings 31

Johnson to

end early

release of

prisoners

Breakthrough extends stroke ‘golden hour’

By Henry Bodkin

HEALTH CORRESPONDENT

PEOPLE who have a stroke could have

the chance of a full recovery thanks to a

stem cell injection that extends the

“golden hour” to a day and a half for

most patients.

Regulators in Europe and the US are

fast-tracking their approval processes

after British patients who tried the

treatment 36 hours after a stroke es-

caped permanent disability.

People who suffer a stroke – roughly

100,000 a year in the UK – must get to a

specialist hospital within about four

hours to begin blood clot-busting treat-

ment, although the best results come in

the first 60 minutes.

Most do not make it in time, how-

ever, contributing to the almost two

thirds of survivors leaving hospital

with a disability.

The new intravenous solution devel-

oped in the US simultaneously regen-

erates damaged tissue, reduces

harmful inflammation, and stimulates

nerve cells that aid recovery in the

brain. Millions of clinical doses can be

harvested from a single donation of

bone marrow.

A preliminary trial conducted in a

handful of patients across the UK and

US indicated they had a 15 per cent

greater chance of making a full recovery

Continued on Page 2

Inquiry into power cut chaos

By Steve Bird and Dominic Nicholls

THE Government has launched an in-

vestigation into how National Grid al-

lowed the biggest power cut in a

decade, plunging the country’s road

and rail networks into chaos.

Announcing the inquiry last night,

Andrea Leadsom, the Energy Secre-

tary, also ordered National Grid to tell

Ofgem, the energy watchdog, how the

failure of a gas-fired power station and

a wind farm left nearly a million homes

and businesses without power.

“Yesterday’s power outages caused

enormous disruption – National Grid

must urgently review and report to Of-

gem,” she said.

She added the Energy Emergencies

Executive Committee, the government

body responsible for ensuring a stable

power supply, would “consider the in-

cident”.

The power outage on Friday means

around a million people could be enti-

tled to compensation after losing their

electricity supply.

Meanwhile rail passengers, some of

whom were stranded on trains stuck

Continued on Page 2

POLARIS / EYEVINE

PM demands change to stop criminals being

automatically freed after half their sentence

By Christopher Hope
CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

PRISONERS will no longer be automati-
cally released early under plans to be set
out by Boris Johnson this week, The
Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
The Prime Minister will pledge to end
the automatic release of serious crimi-
nals who are currently freed after serv-
ing half of their sentence.
He will press for a tougher stance on
sentencing at a roundtable meeting in
No 10 tomorrow with police chiefs,
prosecutors, former judges, courts ad-
ministrators and prison bosses.
Mr Johnson and Robert Buckland,
the Justice Secretary, will also say they
want to keep six-month jail terms as a
last resort but rely increasingly on more
robust community sentences.
The news came as a Sunday Telegraph
investigation discloses today that some
criminals are being released with as lit-
tle as a fifth of their sentences served.
The sentencing plans are at the fore-
front of a series of measures to tackle
violent crime that will be unveiled by
Mr Johnson over the next few days.
Billions of pounds will be set aside to
provide an additional 10,000 prison
places, including a 1,000-place jail
alongside an existing category “A” facil-
ity at Full Sutton, East Yorkshire.
More cash is also being set aside to in-
crease security in courtrooms.
Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, will
announce today more than 8,000 offic-
ers will now be able to use enhanced
stop-and-search powers in all 43 police
forces across England and Wales.
Under the Criminal Justice Act 2003,
any criminal who receives a non-life
sentence and is judged not to be danger-
ous can leave prison when just half of
their term has been served.
For prison sentences of 12 months or
more, the person spends the first half of
the sentence in prison and the second
half in the community “on licence”.
The proposed change would not ap-
ply to rapists and murderers, whose re-
lease is determined by the Parole Board.
Baroness Newlove, the former Vic-

tims’ Commissioner, has called for

courts to give victims a realistic assess-

ment of how long an offender will

serve rather than misleading “headline”

sentences.

The idea of “honest sentencing” goes

back to a Conservative 2010 manifesto

plan, which would have required judges

to set minimum and maximum sen-

tences. Mr Johnson has criticised soft

justice over many years.

Writing in the The Mail on Sunday to-

day, Mr Johnson said: “At present, there

are too many serious violent or sexual

offenders who are coming out of prison

long before they should.

“This cannot go on. I am afraid that as

a society we have no choice but to insist

on tougher sentencing laws for serious

sexual and violent offenders, and for

those who carry knives.”

The issue has particular resonance

for Mr Johnson because his girlfriend,

Carrie Symonds, 31, was one of the vic-

tims of black cab rapist John Worboys,

controversially recommended for re-

lease by the Parole Board.

The roundtable will be attended by

Mr Buckland, Ms Patel as well as former

senior High Court judge Brian Leveson,

Lynn Owens, the director general of the

National Crime Agency, and Dame Vera

Baird, the Victims’ Commissioner.

Mr Johnson is understood to want to

look at “the end of automatic early re-

lease of serious criminals” who are al-

lowed to leave prison after just half of

their terms have been served.

Duwayne Brooks, best friend of the

black teenager Stephen Lawrence, who

was murdered by white thugs in a racist

attack in 1993, welcomed Mr Johnson’s

“tough approach to violent crime”.

Reports: Pages 4-

Editorial Comment: Page 19

Epstein takes

sex ring secrets

to grave after

suicide in cell

By Nick Allen in Washington

JEFFREY EPSTEIN, the disgraced fi-

nancier charged with child sex traffick-

ing, took his secrets to the grave after

apparently hanging himself in a prison

cell yesterday while awaiting trial.

The FBI launched an investigation

into the death as a row erupted over

how Epstein was allowed to cheat jus-

tice, with victims expressing anger at

being denied their day in court.

Epstein’s death meant the full story

of the potential connections of political

figures and celebrities to his alleged

sex ring may never be told.

His lawyers initially refused to rule

out foul play, fueling conspiracy theo-

ries that Epstein’s death will silence

further damaging revelations.

Epstein, 66, died the day after docu-

ments were released in a civil case in

which Virginia Giuffre, who claimed to

have been his teenage “sex slave,” had

sued Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, Epstein’s

former girlfriend, for defamation.

Mrs Giuffre, now 35, had claimed to

have had sex with the Duke of York

when she was 17. The Duke has always

denied the allegations, which were

struck from court record in 2015 after

being described as “immaterial and im-

pertinent” by the judge.

Epstein was found unresponsive in

his cell at the Metropolitan Correc-

tional Center in Manhattan at 6.30am

yesterday. It was “an apparent suicide”,

the US department of justice said.

Prison officials tried unsuccessfully

to resuscitate him, and he was taken to

New York Presbyterian-Lower Man-

hattan Hospital an hour later. He was

pronounced dead on arrival.

Bill Barr, the US attorney general,

was said to be “livid and appalled”. He

said the death “raises serious questions

that must be answered”.

Mrs Giuffre’s lawyer called for inves-

tigations into associates of Epstein to

continue. Sigrid McCawley said: “We

are hopeful that the government will

continue to investigate, and will focus

on those who participated and facili-

tated Epstein’s horrifying sex traffick-

ing scheme that damaged so many.”

Epstein had previously been found

with bruises on his neck on July 25.

He had been in a shared cell with an

inmate called Nicholas Tartaglione, a

former police officer charged with

murder, but it was unclear whether

they were still in the same cell.

Epstein was in a high security unit,

where prison officers were supposed to

check all prisoners every 30 minutes,

but the procedure was reportedly not

followed on the night Epstein died.

The jail also had the capacity to video

monitor a prisoner constantly but it

was not clear if that was done.

Reports: Pages 2-

‘As a society we have no

choice but to insist on

tougher sentencing laws

for serious offenders’

Jeffrey Epstein, 66, was found dead in his prison cell in a special high security unit in Manhattan at 6.30am yesterday

36

The number of hours after a stroke that

the stem cell injection could be given to

prevent permanent disability

‘We are hopeful that the

government will focus on

those who facilitated

Epstein’s sex trafficking’

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