Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what proportion of (a) men and (b) women accused of murder were convicted in each of the last five years; and what the average length of sentence for murder was of each of those people so convicted in each of those years.

The number of defendants proceeded against at magistrates’ courts and found guilty of murder, in England and Wales, from 2011 to 2015 can be found in the ‘Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly: December 2015 which can be found on Gov.uk.

Murder carries a mandatory life sentence. These sentences are specifically excluded from the average custodial sentence length calculation.