Nicholas Prosper sentence appeal to be heard in July

A bid to have the sentence of triple murderer Nicholas Prosper increased to a whole-life order is due to be heard on 16 July.

Prosper was jailed for life with a minimum term of 49 years after admitting killing his mother, brother and sister at their home in Luton on 13 September 2024.

The 19-year-old also pleaded guilty to weapons charges after plotting a mass shooting at his former primary school in the town.

Solicitor General Lucy Rigby KC referred the sentence to the Court of Appeal in April, branding it “unduly lenient”.

A spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office said at the time that Prosper “ought to have been given a whole-life order”.

Whole life orders are considered the harshest penalty available to courts since capital punishment was abolished.

Prosper gunned down his mother Juliana Falcon, 48, and sister Giselle Prosper, 13, before stabbing his 16-year-old brother Kyle more than 100 times.

He then hid for more than two hours before flagging down police officers in a nearby street, showing them his loaded shotgun and 33 cartridges.

His sentencing in March heard he wanted to go on and “be known posthumously as the world’s most famous school shooter of the 21st Century”.

Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told Luton Crown Court: “The lives of your own mother, and younger brother and sister were to be collateral damage on the way to fulfil your ambition.”

Prosper’s plan would have led to the deaths of 34 people in total: his family, two teachers, four-year-old pupils at his old school and then, finally, himself.

However, it was derailed when noise made by his family as they were being killed alerted neighbours in their tower block in the Marsh Farm area of Luton.

While sentencing, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said she would not impose a whole-life order because Prosper was stopped from carrying out the school shooting.

While he was “indisputably a very dangerous young man”, the risk to the public was met with a life sentence, she concluded.

Rules were changed in 2022 to allow defendants aged between 18 and 20 to receive whole-life orders in exceptional circumstances, but no one in that age bracket has received the sentence since then.

The judge said in March the threshold remained “exceptionally high”.

“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,” she added.

“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.”

The case was referred to the Attorney General’s Office by the shadow justice minister Kieran Mullan, who said the killings were “the most serious of crimes”.