Murderers can continue to be sentenced to die in jail after a human rights court ruled today that the whole-life tariff does not amount to degrading treatment.
The triple murderer Arthur Hutchinson failed in his final attempt to prove that his sentence was inhumane and degrading because he had no hope of release.
Judges at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) voted 14 to 3 that there had been no violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The ruling means that courts in England and Wales can continue to impose the sentence, which is handed down to people convicted of the worst murders, including serial killers.
There are currently 63 people serving whole-life sentences, including five held in top-security psychiatric hospitals.
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Among them are the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, Dale Cregan, convicted of the murder of four people including two female police officers, and Thomas Mair, who murdered the Labour MP Jo Cox last year.
The ECHR ruling said that whole-life prisoners could be released if the secretary of state for justice believed there were exceptional grounds to do so.
The ruling added that it was open to Hutchinson to trigger a review of his detention by the secretary of state.
Hutchinson, 75, was jailed in 1984 for stabbing Basil and Avril Laitner to death and killing one of their sons after breaking into the couple’s home in Sheffield. He also raped a woman.
In 2008 Hutchinson had a domestic appeal against whole-life tariffs dismissed by the Court of Appeal.
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In 2015 the ECHR threw out his case, but he applied for it to be passed to the Strasbourg court’s Grand Chamber.
Elizabeth Truss, the justice secretary, said: “It is right that those who commit the most heinous crimes spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
“It is also wholly right that judges are able to hand down whole life sentences to the very worst offenders in our society.”