Until a few years ago I had never heard of a single case of a murderer declining to go into the dock to hear their sentence. I doubt whether any of them even realised that they had the choice.

Yet in recent years, the word seems to have spread and something of a fashion has developed for them to stay in their cells and refuse to enter the court-room.

It hardly surprising that many bereaved relatives are astonished and disgusted that such a thing is possible.

Judges, including Mr Justice Goss at Lucy Letby’s sentencing hearing, have decided that they have no power to do anything but accept this state of affairs. They are probably right, although their view rests in part on a 1990 case which decided only that the judge had no power to order that an unconvicted defendant should be physically forced to return to the witness box after deciding that his cross-examination by a co-accused had become intolerable.

Do we really want hearings with the defendant bound and gagged in the dock?

What the killers who have decided to stay away have in common – apart from convictions for the most heinous of murders – is that each of them have been facing either an inevitable whole life term, as in Letby’s case, or a life sentence with a minimum term so long that it is virtually a whole life equivalent.

If you are an ‘ordinary’ murderer it is very stupid not to attend your sentencing. You can, with varying degrees of sincerity, express remorse for your actions. You can instruct your barrister to put forward mitigation that might reduce your minimum term by a year or two. Even if that is impossible, at least by turning up you do not run the risk of annoying the judge who has to sentence you.

However, if an exceptionally severe sentence is inevitable there comes a point at which it becomes entirely rational for the defendant to stay away, perhaps especially in cases where they maintain their innocence.

As Letby’s counsel, Ben Myers KC, put it today: ‘There is nothing that we are able to add that is capable of reducing the sentence.’ If the sentence is inevitable and the law permits you to avoid sitting in the dock listening to the agonised personal statements of the bereaved and the condemnation of the judge, why would you want to come?

So unless the law is changed, it is likely that future mass murderers will – rationally – also decline to attend their sentencing hearings.

The government has therefore announced that it intends to change the law. That is understandable and popular, but this is where it becomes more complicated. How is the law to be changed? There is the danger of doing something simply because ‘something must be done’.

Of course prisons can – albeit sometimes with difficulty – ensure that prisoners are brought to court. The prison system rests on the availability of legally applied brute force to make sometimes very dangerous people do what they do not want to do.

Bringing unwilling prisoners into the dock for the sentencing hearing is not so straightforward. A courtroom on the solemn occasion of the sentencing of a mass murderer is not the place for the legal application of brute force.

And what of terrorist murderers, many of whom will face the longest possible sentences, some of whom would positively welcome the opportunity to disrupt proceedings? Are they to be allowed to remain in court however they behave, simply because a law says they must be present? Is a judge to be permitted to exclude them for misbehaviour? And if so will they not have the ability then to achieve a small victory on their last public appearance?

Of course it is possible to entirely immobilise and silence anyone, but do we really want hearings with the defendant bound and gagged in the dock? Is that really the path down which we want to proceed? If it is so important that murderers be placed on public view for one last time we might as well pull them through the streets in a toughened glass tumbril.

There is an alternative. All Crown Courts are now equipped with excellent CCTV. If the defendant refuses to attend court, all the purposes of a sentencing hearing – apart from the public spectacle of the wretched prisoner in the dock – can be achieved without risking the dignity of the proceedings by locking him or her into a cell into which the proceedings are broadcast.