Most realistically, no one is going to go on the books as the person who voted to repeal the crime of rape.
More pragmatically, repealing a law that someone is in prison for always creates an argument that they shouldn’t be there any more. Often seen with drug legalization, but I’m sure someone would try to argue that because the exact type of sexual assault they were guilty of isn’t a crime anymore, despite an equivalent existing, that they should get some type of break.
I’m not in the UK, so I can’t speak to their legislative process as specifically unfortunately.
Follow-up: I started to look it up, and as far as I can the the UK legislative bookkeeping system is fucking insane. They don’t organize their laws in sections, they just refer to them by the act that passed it. So rather than passing a law that says “we’re amending section 792.5078r to include new definitions”, they just say “here’s a new act with a new crime, and rape includes mouths now”.
Also the UK has three legal systems, they’re bound together in what feels like a very disorderd fashion, and the following sentence from their judiciary scares me deeply, as a proper American:
Our lack of a written constitution is one of the consequences of the way the current political and legal institutions in the United Kingdom have evolved since 1066
Most realistically, no one is going to go on the books as the person who voted to repeal the crime of rape.
More pragmatically, repealing a law that someone is in prison for always creates an argument that they shouldn’t be there any more. Often seen with drug legalization, but I’m sure someone would try to argue that because the exact type of sexual assault they were guilty of isn’t a crime anymore, despite an equivalent existing, that they should get some type of break.
I’m not in the UK, so I can’t speak to their legislative process as specifically unfortunately.
Follow-up: I started to look it up, and as far as I can the the UK legislative bookkeeping system is fucking insane. They don’t organize their laws in sections, they just refer to them by the act that passed it. So rather than passing a law that says “we’re amending section 792.5078r to include new definitions”, they just say “here’s a new act with a new crime, and rape includes mouths now”.
Also the UK has three legal systems, they’re bound together in what feels like a very disorderd fashion, and the following sentence from their judiciary scares me deeply, as a proper American:
https://www.judiciary.uk/about-the-judiciary/our-justice-system/jud-acc-ind/justice-sys-and-constitution/