Cap Sentence Discounts at 40% — limiting how much judges can reduce criminal sentences

The Policy: National Sentencing Reform Policy — 2023 Election →

National promised to stop judges stacking sentence discounts that, the Government argued, allowed serious offenders to serve far too little of their nominal sentence. The proposal drew on widespread public frustration that a convicted offender might receive a 20% discount for a guilty plea, another 10% for remorse, and further reductions for youth or background — compounding into reductions well above 40% of the starting point. The policy was delivered in full: the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Act 2025 came into force on 29 June 2025.

What it does:

• 40% aggregate cap: Total discounts for personal mitigating factors — guilty plea, remorse, youth, personal background — are capped at 40% combined, unless applying the cap would produce a manifestly unjust outcome.
• Sliding guilty-plea scale: A tiered discount system ranging from a maximum 25% reduction for the earliest possible guilty plea, scaling down to just 5% when a defendant switches to guilty during trial itself, discouraging late plea changes that waste court time.
• No repeat remorse or youth discounts: Reductions for remorse and youth can only be applied once in an offender's criminal career, removing the ability to claim them afresh at each subsequent sentencing.
• Three new aggravating factors: Offending against sole-charge workers, aiding and abetting young people to offend, and livestreaming crimes are now statutory aggravating factors judges must weigh.
• Cumulative sentencing push: Courts are directed to consider consecutive rather than concurrent sentences for offences committed while on bail, in custody, or on parole.
• Victim focus: Sentencing principles now explicitly require courts to consider victim-interest information at the point of sentencing.

Where things stand:

The legislation passed Parliament in early 2025 with National's coalition partners ACT and NZ First supporting it. Labour, the Green Party, and Te Paati Māori all voted against the bill. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith argued the reforms would restore public confidence in a justice system he said had become marked by "undue leniency." The Ministry of Justice projected the changes could cost up to $150 million over ten years and increase the prison population by more than 1,300 inmates — a figure critics seized on as evidence the policy prioritises punishment over rehabilitation.

Opposition parties focused their criticism on root causes. Labour's Duncan Webb warned the reforms would "clog up the courts" and create worse offenders; the Green Party's Tamatha Paul argued that longer sentences in under-resourced prisons produce more hardened criminals rather than reformed ones. Te Paati Māori's Tākuta Ferris highlighted the disproportionate impact on Māori, noting the changes ignore systemic inequality as a driver of offending. Legal academics writing for outlets like The Conversation and RNZ warned that a blanket cap risks overriding genuine mitigating circumstances in individual cases, and that judges may feel pressure to inflate starting-point sentences to preserve sentencing room — potentially an unintended inflationary effect.

Supporters counter that the pre-reform system produced outcomes most New Zealanders found difficult to accept: headline sentences that bore little relationship to time actually served. The government's stated goal is 20,000 fewer victims by 2029, though no mechanism has been announced to independently track that target against the sentencing law changes specifically.

What to watch:

• Court data from late 2025 onward: Whether the sliding guilty-plea scale triggers more defendants to contest charges rather than plead early, increasing trial lists in an already stretched court system.
• Prison population trajectory: The Ministry of Justice's 1,300-inmate projection versus actual prison muster figures — a key test of fiscal and humanitarian cost.
• Case law on "manifestly unjust" exceptions: How judges interpret and apply the escape valve, and whether appellate courts develop a body of guidance that narrows or broadens the cap's practical reach.
• Māori over-representation data: Whether Corrections' demographic reporting shows an acceleration of Māori imprisonment rates attributable to the new provisions.