Henry Nowak was 18 years old. He was stabbed, left bleeding in the street, and then — in footage that has since been described by the Prime Minister himself as making him feel physically sick — handcuffed by responding police officers as he died. Vickrum Digwa, 23, was convicted of his murder and sentenced to life with a minimum term of 21 years at Southampton Crown Court. The Attorney General's office has now confirmed it is considering whether that minimum term is enough.

A spokesman for the Attorney General confirmed the office had received "multiple requests" for Digwa's sentence to be reviewed under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme — the formal legal mechanism that allows the Crown to refer a sentence back to the Court of Appeal if it is deemed insufficiently severe. The ULS scheme has strict time limits and a high bar: the court must find not merely that the sentence is on the light side, but that it falls outside the range a reasonable judge, properly applying the guidelines, could have imposed. The Attorney General has not yet said whether a referral will be made.

The murder itself was rooted in racist targeting. Digwa, a Sikh man, attacked Nowak — who was white — in what prosecutors established as a racially motivated killing. The court found the racist element as an aggravating factor. Digwa was described during proceedings as callous and showed no remorse. At sentencing, the judge set the minimum at 21 years, meaning Digwa will not be eligible for parole consideration until he has served that term. Whether that figure reflects the gravity of the crime — a premeditated, racially aggravated murder of a teenager — is now formally in question.

The wider scandal of what happened after the stabbing has become inseparable from the case itself. Body-worn camera footage of officers handcuffing Nowak as he lay critically wounded generated nationwide revulsion when it became public. The Home Secretary described the footage as "disturbing" and demanded answers. The Prime Minister said watching it made him feel sick. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary has faced sustained scrutiny over those officers' conduct, with the footage prompting calls for a full accountability process — not just an internal review. Several of the officers involved had their personal details published online after what were described as vigilante justice calls, a development that raised its own serious concerns about threats to police personnel, however legitimate the public anger at their conduct.

For Nowak's family, neither the sentence nor the political reaction has delivered what they actually need: a clear account of how their son was failed, twice — once by the man who killed him, and once by the officers who found him dying. The family has been consistent in saying they want truth and institutional accountability, not political point-scoring. Their position is an important corrective to the way the case has been leveraged across the political spectrum. Nigel Farage and others on the right raised it publicly, emphasising the racial dimension of the attack. The government responded with statements of sympathy and condemnation. Neither response changes what happened on that street.

The ULS scheme is a narrow legal tool. The Attorney General cannot simply decide the sentence feels wrong and send it back. A referral requires a legal argument that the sentencing judge made an error of principle or departed from guidelines without proper justification. With a minimum of 21 years on a life sentence for a racially aggravated murder, the argument will need to be specific: was the starting point too low given the aggravating factors? Was the judge's weighing of those factors — the planning, the racial motivation, the age of the victim — legally defensible? Those are questions for Crown barristers to assess, and the Attorney General's office has until its statutory deadline to decide.

What the review will not do, regardless of outcome, is address the policing failure. That sits in a separate process — complaints, misconduct proceedings, and potentially the Independent Office for Police Conduct — and moves on its own timeline. The two scandals in this case are legally distinct even though they are morally fused: one man killed Henry Nowak, and then a group of officers treated his dying body as a threat to be restrained. Both demand accountability. So far, only the first has produced any.

The Attorney General's office will either refer the sentence or it will not. If it does, the Court of Appeal will hear arguments about whether 21 years is the floor of what justice requires for this killing. If it does not, Digwa's minimum term stands, and the public debate about whether the courts are applying the full weight of the law to racially aggravated murder will continue without a formal answer. Either way, Henry Nowak's family is still waiting for the full accounting they have asked for — not the one that politicians want to give.