The five-year history of the three-strikes law which significantly increases the prison sentences of persons convicted of multiple, violent crimes demonstrates that the Hungarian reforms also work in penal policy, the Minister of State of the Ministry of Justice said at his press conference held on 10 August 2015 in Budapest.

Róbert Répássy pointed out: the longer prison sentences of the most dangerous criminals provide more effective protection. There were cases in the past when crimes could have been prevented through the application of the three-strikes law.

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The essence of the introduction of the stringent provision in the Penal Code in the summer of 2010 is that the sentence of a person convicted on a final and absolute basis of the commission of violent crimes against persons for the third time is doubled, and if its upper limit exceeds twenty years, the person must be given an actual life sentence without the possibility of parole. According to the statistics of the Chief Prosecutor’s Office, this rule has been applied in the case of 473 such perpetrators in the past five years; more than 250 of them are currently serving their sentences, six of them serving actual life sentences.

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In answer to a question, the Minister of State said that, upon the passage of just half a decade, it is difficult to demonstrate as yet direct correlations between the three-strikes law and criminal statistics. However, the results of the more stringent penal policy can be readily demonstrated in connection with the life sentence without the possibility of parole introduced ffiteen years ago, in 1999: while there were around 300 homicides in Hungary annually on average at the beginning of the nineties, this figure remains below 150 today.

The new Penal Code further clarified the rules of the three-strikes law, based on which it can only be applied in the case of completed acts, i.e. it cannot be imposed in relation to crimes abandoned in the experimental or preparatory phase. The Constitutional Court repealed the so-called accumulative three strikes which formerly also permitted the imposition of more stringent sentences in cases when the perpetrator committed violent crimes against three persons simultaneously by virtue of a single act. As a result, in the wake of the decision of the Constitutional Court, the three-strikes law is now only applicable if the perpetrator repeatedly commits a violent crime against a person as a repeat offender after two final and absolute convictions.

(Ministry of Justice)