Case Precedent

In an indecent assault trial which turned on the comparative credibility of the complainant and the defendant, the judge should have given a full good-character direction in respect of the defendant. His failure to do so, coupled with his direction that the jury should treat the unchallenged evidence of the defendant’s character witnesses with caution, simply because they knew him well, rendered the defendant’s conviction unsafe.

A challenge, by way of judicial review, by a young offender convicted of the murder and rape of a 14-year-old girl, to an excepting direction which discharged a reporting restriction order imposed under the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 s.45(3), was refused.

A sentence of 16 months’ imprisonment imposed on a man in his early 20s who had shared indecent images of children with workmates on a building site, but had done so for shock value and had no unhealthy interest in children, was suspended on appeal. An immediate custodial sentence was disproportionate where the possession and distribution had been limited, he had acted out of extreme stupidity, was of previous good character and where his mother was dependent on him financially and as her carer.

A judge had erred in imposing a wasted costs order on a defence barrister after discharging the jury following the barrister’s closing speech. In front of the jury, the barrister had inappropriately criticised the procedure by which questions for young and vulnerable witnesses were formulated in advance, and had also strayed beyond the bounds of appropriate comment in relation to the complainant’s sexual behaviour. However, his comments could have been dealt with in the judge’s summing up and did not call for the discharge of the jury.

Convictions for rape and indecent assault were deemed unsafe where a judge had failed to give a jury clear directions as to whether, and if so how, they could rely on the evidence of each victim when considering the allegations made by the other.

A defendant had received a fair trial in a case concerning historical child sex offences where various pieces of contemporaneous evidence had been lost or destroyed. There was a substantial amount of additional material that could be used to test the reliability and credibility of the complainant, and the judge had given an impeccable direction to the jury to consider whether the defendant had been placed at a real disadvantage when they decided whether the prosecution had satisfied them of his guilt.

There was no general principle that delay, in a criminal trial involving young children, meant that the evidence of that child should always be excluded at a subsequent trial; each case was fact specific. In the instant case, a judge had been entitled to admit a child’s Achieving Best Evidence interview at trial despite the delay of two years and four months since the interview had taken place.

A custodial sentence of 9 years and 6 months and a further probation period of one year imposed on a 91-year-old former monk for historical offences of indecent assault, buggery and attempted buggery was unduly lenient, and was replaced with a custodial term of 12 years.

The appropriate total sentence for two offences of sexual assault and one of blackmail was an immediate custodial term of three years. When imposing a suspended sentence of 18 months’ imprisonment, the sentencing judge had given too much weight to mitigating factors, including the fact that the offender had Asperger’s Syndrome, and insufficient weight to the seriousness of the blackmail offence. He had also erred in finding that the victim’s apparent consent to sexual activity on one occasion had lessened the seriousness of the subsequent sexual assaults.