Powell And Barnes Should Be In Prison. The Law Said Otherwise Callum Powell admitted possessing almost 3,000 indecent images of children, 178 of them Category A, the classification reserved for the most serious abuse, including penetrative abuse of children. District Judge Amanda Kelly did not treat this as a borderline case. She ruled plainly that "only a custodial sentence can be justified," and raised the starting point from twelve to eighteen months because of the volume of material, the victims' age, and the two years over which it was collected. Powell's early guilty plea cut that to exactly twelve months. Under the Sentencing Act 2026, twelve months triggers automatic suspension. A judge who found custody necessary was overruled by the law itself, not by her own judgment. This is precisely the outcome David Lammy told Parliament would not happen. Introducing the Act, he said it would keep prisons from being left "with nowhere to put dangerous offenders." Powell was not a low-level offender diverted from an overcrowded system. A judge examined his case and found, in explicit terms, that only custody would do. The law intervened anyway, for the exact category of offender Lammy promised it would not touch. Powell is not the only example. Clint Barnes, 56, convicted of three indecent assaults from the late 1990s and early 2000s, two against a boy under 16, received the same automatic suspension. Sentencing him, Judge Stephen Climie told him plainly: "I don't deal with the legislation, I have to apply it... this is a case which last year I would have sent you to custody immediately for 12 months, I suspend that for the next two years." A second judge, a second case of child abuse, and the same words: the law left no choice. Judge Kelly's own words leave little room for the government to explain this away as an isolated misapplication. "Some may find it difficult to understand why offending of such a repugnant nature does not result in immediate imprisonment," she said, before adding that judges "sentence according to the law enacted by Parliament," not public outrage. That is a serving judge stating, for the record, that Parliament's own law produced a result she could not defend on its merits. The pattern extends beyond child abuse. Sentencing Michael Ronner for killing Tyler Carley through drink driving, a judge set six months in prison as the right sentence, then suspended it regardless, warning the gallery this would be "difficult... to hear." Different courts, different offences, the same structural dead end, described in almost identical language: I know what this offence deserves, and the law will not let me impose it. Parliament had a chance to close this gap and declined to take it. When the Act was debated in the Lords, Lord Keen tried to exclude sexual offences and domestic abuse from automatic suspension. Labour peers defeated the amendment, arguing the existing "significant risk" exemption already protected victims in serious cases. Liam McCarthy's case tests that assurance directly. He broke his partner's tooth, left her with two black eyes and a displaced septum requiring surgery, in an assault severe enough that police found blood stains throughout the property. Judge Dennis Watson KC found this did not meet the "significant risk" threshold, and suspended the sentence. The safeguard Labour said would catch cases like this did not catch this one. None of this is a prediction about what the law might do. It is a record of what it has already done, in judges' own words, in cases with names attached. Ministers promised dangerous offenders would still go to prison and victims of serious violence would still be protected. Powell, Barnes, Ronner and McCarthy are the answer to whether those promises held. Each judge said, in terms, that the law left them no choice. The choice was made in Westminster, not in any of their courtrooms. "Callum Powell admitted possessing almost 3,000 indecent images of children"