Issue 176  16th January 2021

Defendants, victims including teenagers, and witnesses are having to wait up to four years from the time of an alleged offence to the case reaching crown court trial because of delays caused mainly by Covid. Lawyers, who are struggling to keep the criminal courts in England and Wales functioning through the pandemic, are calling for more socially-distanced, emergency courts to tackle the problem of justice being postponed. They also blame past government cuts that closed hundreds of courts and restricted judges’ sitting days for the vast backlog. The latest, mutant strain of the coronavirus is likely to intensify pressure on the criminal justice system.

The number of outstanding crown court cases has risen to 53,000; the caseload in the magistrates court is above 400,000. Those figures represent increases of more than 40% compared with the previous year.

Almost all legal hearings must be stopped because of safety fears, a law association has urged as figures show at least 600 court users have caught coronavirus in recent weeks.

Figures released by the Ministry of Justice show that 434 court staff, 69 judges and magistrates, 23 jurors and 73 other court users tested positive for Covid-19 between 24 November and Monday. The true number is feared to be higher, as there is no official requirement for defendants, witnesses, journalists, members of the public and other people who visit courts to report a subsequent coronavirus diagnosis, and not everyone may have been tested.

A total of 196 courts reported confirmed cases in the period, with the worst - Oxford Combined Court - on 20, followed by the London Central Family Court (16), Medway County Court (13), Port Talbot (11) and the Old Bailey on 10.

Criminal trials will be held in the High Court from today as part of the government’s pandemic response to the crisis in the justice system. Two courtrooms within the sprawling Royal Courts of Justice estate in central London have been converted into emergency crown courtrooms for jury trials... Test events were conducted last week in courts 28 and 38 at the High Court ahead of this week’s opening, with two jury trials due to start today.

More than 400,000 crime records could have been affected by a data blunder, with records for serious offences supposed to be kept forever accidentally deleted and police fearing criminals may not be caught, a letter from a senior officer reveals. The records were accidentally deleted due to a coding error on 10 January, and the incident affects fingerprints, DNA, and arrest records on the police national computer (PNC)...

A letter sent to senior officers on the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) on Friday from deputy chief constable Naveed Malik, lead for the organisation on the PNC, outlines the scale of records affected: “In PNC approximately 213,000 offence records, 175,000 arrest records and 15,000 person records have potentially been deleted in error. In terms of understanding the potential linkage between records, a one-person record can have multiple arrest records and one arrest record can have multiple offences linked to it.”

The DNA database is connected to the PNC and has also been hit, the police chief’s letter reveals. It says: “Approximately 26,000 DNA records corresponding to 21,710 subjects have potentially been deleted in error, including records that have previously been marked for indefinite retention following conviction of serious offences.”

Technicians are also scrambling to recover tens of thousands of fingerprint records, according to the deputy chief constable’s letter, which says that “30,000 fingerprint records and 600 subject records have potentially been deleted in error”.

On Sunday 25 October 2020 a distress signal was sent from the Nave Andromeda oil tanker once it had reached UK waters. At an earlier stage in the journey seven stowaways had made themselves known to the captain and crew and the vessel made unsuccessful attempts to dock in other jurisdictions. Initial accounts provided to UK authorities suggested that the crew had been threatened. Following the intervention of the British armed forces seven men were arrested...

We took the decision, based upon everything we knew at the time, to charge two men with the offence of conduct endangering ships under s.58 Merchant Shipping Act 1995. However, while initial reports had indicated there was a risk of destruction or serious damage to the ship and risk of harm to the crew, additional mobile phone footage made available to us by the police subsequently, together with further expert analysis of the evidence, cast doubt on whether the ship or the crew were in fact put in danger. As the evidence, when made available and fully considered, could not show that the ship or crew were threatened while in UK waters, the legal test for the offence of conduct endangering ships under s.58 Merchant Shipping Act 1995 was no longer met and we discontinued the case...