Dirk van Zyl Smit, a law professor, argues against life sentences without the possibility of parole, writing that “even the worst offenders have the right to hope”:
A commitment that we will never consider the release of some offenders serving life sentences, except perhaps when they are at death’s door, means that we write them off permanently. It means that we deny that with the passage of time they may change for the better; or that we may change our assessment of their crimes. Worse still, we are denying some fellow humans all hope. In that sense we are putting them in the same position as those awaiting execution on death row.
In July 2013, in the case of Vinter and Others, the grand chamber of the European Court of Human Rights explained why it was fundamentally unacceptable for the United Kingdom to deny these prisoners any prospect of release. Its thinking is best captured in the opinion of Judge Power-Forde of the Republic of Ireland:
Hope is an important and constitutive aspect of the human person. Those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts and who inflict untold suffering upon others, nevertheless retain their fundamental humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change. Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retain the right tohope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed … To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and, to do that, would be degrading.
The Dish 