SEXUAL OFFENCES

The General Pharmaceutical Council’s Fitness to Practice Committee had been entitled to remove a locum from the register of pharmacists where it had used its expertise and experience to form the view that there was a risk that he would repeat behaviour that had led him to commit serious sexual offences and where he had shown little insight into his conduct.

The conviction of a vulnerable adult with a severe learning disability for the offence of sexual activity by a care worker with a person with a mental disability was unsafe, and was accordingly quashed, where inadequate consideration had been given to his learning disability in the course of the trial. Fresh psychological evidence demonstrated that he would have had difficulty in dealing with leading questions asked in cross-examination, and that might have left the jury with a false impression.

A judge’s decision to stay a prosecution as an abuse of process on the basis of a failure by the prosecution to properly pursue a line of enquiry when investigating allegations of sexual assault was wrong in principle and did not constitute a reasonable exercise of his discretion.

The court allowed Romania’s appeal against the grant of bail to a requested person who had been convicted and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for sexual offences against an 11-year-old girl whilst working as her dance teacher. The court was satisfied that there were substantial grounds to believe that the requested person would fail to surrender at the extradition hearing.

The court rejected a submission that photographs of young naked children could not be indecent as a matter of law: that question was for a jury to decide, and any categorisation of those photographs was only useful for sentencing purposes.

A decision to prosecute a 10-year-old boy for sexual offences committed against a younger boy was not irrational, nor had there been a failure by the CPS to follow its settled policy on the prosecution of young offenders.

When an offender was sentenced for historic sexual offences, he was not to be sentenced on any count to more than the maximum term available at the time of the offending. That said, sentencing had to reflect modern attitudes, and the court could take account of modern sentencing guidelines.

An individual had been incorrectly convicted of a historic offence of rape against a family member because, at the relevant time, anal penetration did not constitute that offence under the Sexual Offences Act 1956 s.1. It was appropriate to substitute an alternative conviction for indecent assault, as the facts fell within the scope of s.14(1) of the 1956 Act, and the test set out in R. v Graham (Hemamali Krishna) [1997] 1 Cr. App. R. 302 was satisfied.

Not guilty verdicts returned by a jury in respect of two of five counts of historic indecent assault did not demonstrate that the judge’s refusal to stay the prosecution on the ground of abuse of process due to delay and the consequent loss of evidence was mistaken, or that the verdicts were illogical or in any other way unsafe.