Henry Nowak’s killer’s appeal ‘ludicrous’, says family

Under the Sentencing Act 2026, which came into force on 1 October, most prisoners serving fixed-term sentences of up to two and a half years are automatically released on licence after serving a third of the time, rather than half.

Kaur, who is appealing against her sentence, would serve the rest of it in the community on licence, and could be recalled to prison if she breached her licence conditions.

She spent 221 days on remand, which the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said was taken into account when she was sentenced.

Her crime of assisting an offender is not one of the offences excluded from changes to the early release scheme.

Digwa stabbed Henry with a blade he claimed he was carrying for religious reasons linked to his Sikh faith.

Wendy Joseph KC, former judge at the Old Bailey, told the BBC’s Today programme: “There’s a lot of muddled thinking about this, it is primarily relevant to whether or not you are allowed to carry the blade at all and that’s a different offence of which he was also convicted – carrying the blade.

“You have a defence if you have a religious reason for carrying it but you lose that defence as soon as you actually use it as a weapon.”

She explained: “Its relevance to murder is different, its relevance to murder is very important because if you have a murder in which someone carries an unlawful weapon to a scene to use it for the purposes of an offence, any offence, and then you do commit a murder with it your starting point after getting life imprisonment is a minimum sentence of 25 years.

“If you have a lawful reason for carrying it and you are not carrying it in order to carry out some sort of offence your starting point is 15 years.”

Dear Henry: Our Fight for Justice – A Tonight Special airs on Thursday 5 November at 9pm, on ITV1, ITVX, STV and ITV News YouTube.