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A free weekly collection of criminal law links - for practitioners, law students, and anyone with an interest in the criminal justice system of England and Wales.
Curated by Sam Willis, a barrister at 5 King's Bench Walk.
News
Youth Court Location Monitoring Tags
The Ministry of Justice is introducing location monitoring tags to Youth courts across England and Wales as an option for Bail, Remand to Local Authority Accommodation (RLAA) and Youth Rehabilitation Orders (YROs). This follows the introduction of location monitoring to eligible adult cohorts which was completed in September 2019. The roll-out of satellite-enabled tags is the most significant change in Electronic Monitoring (EM) since 1999, and provides a valuable extra tool for the management of offenders and defendants in the community.
The MoJ is now rolling out the tags across the whole of England and Wales as an option in two stages:
- 27 January – London courts (for those managed by a London Youth Offending Team)
- 30 March – all courts across England and Wales (subject to post-implementation review work)
Mandatory Pupillage Recruitment Timetable
The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has today announced reforms to the advertisement and recruitment process for pupillages.
The reforms will require chambers and other Authorised Education and Training Organisations (AETOs) to recruit pupils in line with the Pupillage Gateway timetable in order to make pupillage recruitment fairer and more consistent. The Gateway is operated by the Bar Council and the timetable runs annually from late November to early May. This prescribes the timelines for each stage of recruiting pupils, including the publication of adverts, submission dates for applications, shortlisting, interviews and making offers. While it will not be compulsory to use the Pupillage Gateway to process applications, adherence to a single recruitment timetable will be in addition to the existing requirement to advertise all pupillages on the Gateway.
The current timetable can be found here.
Launch of Safer Streets Fund
The Safer Streets Fund will open this week for bids from police and crime commissioners (PCCs) across England and Wales to fund initiatives aimed at stopping these offences happening in the first place. The fund is specifically designed for areas that need to tackle theft, robbery and burglary – known as acquisitive crimes.
PCCs can use the fund to improve neighbourhoods by increasing street lighting, installing better locks and gating alleyways. They can also invest the money in other types of crime prevention, such as training community wardens, and delivering local crime prevention advice to residents or Neighbourhood Watch schemes.
Airbus Deferred Prosecution Agreement
The Serious Fraud Office has entered into a record-breaking Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) with the global aerospace company Airbus SE following its approval today by Dame Victoria Sharp, President of the Queen’s Bench Division. Under the terms of the DPA, Airbus SE agrees to pay a fine and costs amounting to €991m here in the UK, and in total, €3.6bn as part the world’s largest global resolution for bribery, involving authorities in France and the United States.
Lisa Osofsky, Director of the SFO, said: "Airbus paid bribes through agents around the world to stack the decks in its favour and win contracts around the globe. Corruption like this undermines free trade and fair development and it is to Airbus’s credit that it has admitted its culpability, cleaned its house and come forward to put this conduct to bed."
Cases
R v Mehta [2019] EWCA Crim 2332
On behalf of the appellant the following two grounds of appeal are advanced with the leave of the Full Court by Ms Eleanor Laws QC, who did not appear at the trial. She submits that the jury did not hear about two significant matters. First, the complainant had lied on oath before the jury when denying that NM was her boyfriend and was the father of her twins. Secondly, in response to a direction from the court made in the criminal proceedings themselves, the complainant had deliberately misled the court and the parties by providing false contact details for her mother-in-law.
In essence, we accept the submissions made by Ms Laws on behalf of the appellant in relation to both grounds of appeal. In relation to the first ground, this is not a fresh evidence case in the conventional sense. This ground arises from a signed statement made by QU on 20 August 2017 which did exist before the trial took place but it was not available to the defence until some time after the trial had taken place. It is not suggested that the prosecution failed in their duties of disclosure. What is submitted, with force in our view, is that if the statement had been available at the time of the trial the defence would have been able to deploy it in various ways; in fact they were not able to do so because they did not have it at that time. Ms Laws fairly accepts that the statement was not given on oath. Nevertheless, as we have mentioned, it was signed and it was made under section 9 of the 1967 Act with the usual declaration: that the person making the statement is aware of the consequences of making a false statement. The statement would have demonstrated that the evidence which QU gave to the jury about her relationship with NM, and in particular about not having had children with him, was a lie.