A triple murderer could have his sentence increased to a whole-life order when the Solicitor General’s bid to have his minimum term raised is heard at the Court of Appeal on Wednesday.
Nicholas Prosper was jailed for a minimum term of 49 years, less 188 days already spent in custody, in March after admitting killing his mother, Juliana Falcon, 48, and siblings Giselle Prosper, 13, and Kyle Prosper, 16, at their family flat in Luton, Bedfordshire, on September 13 2023.
The 19-year-old also admitted weapons charges after plotting a mass shooting at his former primary school in the town.
The Solicitor General referred his sentence to the Court of Appeal as “unduly lenient” in April, with a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office claiming that it believed Prosper “ought to have been given a whole-life order”.
The hearing before the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, Mr Justice Goss and Mr Justice Wall is due to begin at 10.30am at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
After shooting dead his siblings and mother, and stabbing his brother more than 100 times, Prosper hid for more than two hours before flagging down police officers in a nearby street and showing them where he had hidden a loaded shotgun and 33 cartridges near playing fields.
He had bought the firearm and 100 cartridges from a legitimate firearms dealer the day before the murders after forging a gun licence.
Sentencing Prosper at Luton Crown Court in March, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said that a whole-life term could only be given to an 18 to 20-year-old if a court deemed “that the seriousness of the combination of offences is exceptionally high”.
But she stopped short of imposing a whole-life order in Prosper’s case, as he was stopped from carrying out the school shooting, having murdered his family earlier than he intended after his mother woke up.
She continued that while he was “indisputably a very dangerous young man”, the risk to the public was met with a life sentence.
She continued: “Despite the gravity of your crimes, it is the explicit joint submission of counsel that a lengthy, finite term will be a sufficiently severe penalty, and this is not such an exceptionally serious case of the utmost gravity where the sentence of last resort must be imposed on an offender who was 18 at the time and is 19 today.”
As well as the murder sentences, Prosper also received concurrent jail terms of life with a minimum term of 18 years for possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life, three-and-a-half years for buying the gun and one year for possession of a kitchen knife, to run concurrently.
Whole-life orders are reserved for the most serious offences, with those handed the tariffs including Louis De Zoysa, who murdered Metropolitan Police Sergeant Matt Ratana in 2020, and Kyle Clifford, who murdered his ex-partner Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah Hunt and mother Carol Hunt last year.
Rules were changed in 2022 to allow younger defendants aged 18 to 20 to receive whole-life orders in exceptional circumstances, but no-one in that age bracket has received the sentence since then.
