John Darwin received seventy-five months’ imprisonment—six years and three months. The judge gave a substantial but not full discount for his early guilty plea, acknowledging that he had pleaded guilty before trial but noting that the evidence against him was overwhelming, which the Court of Appeal would later confirm reduced the credit he could claim for sparing the court’s time.
Anne Darwin received seventy-eight months’ imprisonment—six years and six months. The three-month difference reflected the jury’s finding that her culpability was fully established—no coercion discount was available because the coercion defence had been rejected.
All sentences were concurrent.
The judge’s remarks addressed the human dimensions of the case directly. The emotional harm done to the sons, he said, justified serious punishment. He quoted the grief inflicted “over the years to those who, in truth, were the real victims, your own sons.” He called the crime “a determined, sustained and sophisticated fraud” and described it as “virtually unique.” He acknowledged that the sums involved were lower than in some major fraud cases the courts had handled, but pointed to the multi-faceted nature of the offending—the range of victims, the duration of the scheme, the number of agencies deceived—and to the human cost as aggravating features that outweighed the relatively modest financial scale.
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## The Court of Appeal
Both Darwins appealed their sentences. The appeal was heard on March 27, 2009, by a panel chaired by the Lord Chief Justice. Both appeals were dismissed.
The grounds advanced on John Darwin’s behalf were that the sentencing judge had not given a full one-third discount for his early guilty plea. The Court of Appeal found that a substantial discount had been given, and that given the overwhelming evidence against him, the judge was not required to treat the plea as worthy of full credit.