About
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
Strategic Review of Policing
Police officers should work under a licence that must be renewed every five years and be subject to strict conditions to boost confidence in policing, an independent review has recommended. The Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales, chaired by Sir Michael Barber and carried out by the Police Foundation thinktank, contains 56 recommendations urging radical reform to police culture, skills and training, and organisational structure. Police chiefs said the report was “thorough and thought-provoking”. The report comes at a time when confidence in policing has been rocked by a series of scandals, predominantly within the Metropolitan police, including the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer and revelations that officers at Charing Cross station shared racist, sexist, misogynistic and Islamophobic messages.
The report can be found here
'West End venue Grand Connaught Rooms to become criminal courthouse'
A historic West End venue accustomed to hosting celebrity galas and major political speeches will soon deliver criminal justice as the latest of London’s ‘Nightingale’ Courts. The Grade II* De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden has been hired by the Ministry of Justice to provide two extra courtrooms from next month. The move – to replace the ad-hoc Nightingale court which is closing in Monument – is announced on the day MPs criticised the department for showing “meagre ambition” in tackling the backlog of nearly 60,000 criminal cases...
'MPs sound alarm over MoJ's 'meagre ambition' to reduce court backlog'
A group of MPs tasked with holding the government to account on public spending has little faith that the Ministry of Justice will be able to recruit enough judges to make a significant dent in the Crown court backlog. In a highly-critical report published today, the Commons public accounts committee said it is not convinced that Dominic Raab's department can recruit enough judges to deliver on its 'meagre ambition' of reducing the backlog to 53,000 cases by March 2025. According to MoJ figures, the backlog stood at 58,350 in December 2021.
The committee pointed out that the ministry’s target relied on increasing the number of days that Crown courts hear cases from 100,000 in 2021-22 to 105,000 in 2022-23, then 106,500 in both 2023-24 and 2024-25. ‘This requires a significant increase in the number of judges, for which the department’s plan does not seem credible,’ the report says. ‘Its plans are predicated on successfully recruiting 78 full-time, salaried circuit judges. This is despite only filling 52 of 63 positions during the previous recruitment round.’ Highlighting an unintended consequence, the report adds: ‘The resulting dependence on deploying criminal barristers and solicitors as part-time judges, as well as increasing the workload of part-time judges, to make up shortfall reduces much-needed capacity within the legal profession to prosecute and defend cases.’ The committee is also concerned that the department’s push to boost judicial numbers will overlook the need to significantly improve judicial diversity.
The report can be found here.
'Sarah Everard: Met Police breached rights of vigil organisers over its handling of event, High Court rules'
The Metropolitan Police breached the rights of organisers of a vigil for Sarah Everard with its handling of the planned event, High Court judges have ruled. Reclaim These Streets (RTS) said the judgment is a “victory for women” and shows the police “were wrong to slience us”. The group planned to hold a socially-distanced vigil on Clapham Common for the 33-year-old marketing executive, who went missing short distance from the south-west London park in March last year. Ms Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, who was then a serving Metropolitan Police firearms officer. The 49-year-old pleaded guilty to his crimes and was handed a whole life sentence, which he is now appealing.
During a two-day hearing in January, RTS co-founders Jessica Leigh, Anna Birley, Henna Shah and Jamie Klingler argued that decisions made by the force in advance of the planned vigil amounted to a breach of their human rights to freedom of speech and assembly, and say the force did not assess the potential risk to public health. The force said the women could face fines of £10,000 each and possible prosecution if the event went ahead. RTS withdrew from the event — but a spontaneous vigil and protest took place instead. The Met defended the claim brought by RTS and argued there was no exception for protest in the coronavirus rules at the time, and that it had “no obligation” to assess the public health risk. In a ruling on Friday morning at London’s Royal Courts of Justice, two senior judges upheld their claim and said the Met’s decisions in advance of the vigil were “not in accordance with the law”.
'Criminal legal aid spend slow due to unclaimed cash'
The Ministry of Justice says unclaimed cash partly explains why it has spent only a fifth of an annual £51m injection for a package of accelerated measures over the course of a year. The extra funding, announced in August 2020, covered unused material, paper-heavy cases, cracked trials, sending cases to the Crown court and pre-charge engagement.
In a parliamentary response this week, justice minister James Cartlidge revealed that total expenditure between September 2020 and September 2021 was £10m. Of this, £2.3m was paid to advocates and £7.7m was paid to litigators. Cartlidge said expenditure on those accelerated items was lower than expected. ‘This is due to a number of factors including the impact of COVID-19 on the court system, which has slowed the rate at which new cases are disposed of by the courts, meaning that the build-up of expenditure on these measures has been generally slower than anticipated. Additionally, there have been lower than expected numbers of providers making claims where they are eligible to do so under certain accelerated items such as the fixed fee for consideration of unused material,’ the minister said.
Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation Reappointed
Following a successful first term of appointment, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Jonathan Hall QC, has been reappointed for a further term of 3 years from 23 May 2022 until 22 May 2025, in line with the Governance Code on Public Appointments. Jonathan Hall QC was first appointed to the role in 2019.
Cases
Bendt v Crown Prosecution Service [2022] EWHC 502 (Admin)
This appeal requires further consideration of the circumstances in which the use of a hand-held mobile telephone when driving contravened s.41D of the Road Traffic Act 1988 and Regulation 110 of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986. The appellant appeals by way of case stated from a decision of the Bexley Magistrates' Court on 14 June 2021, convicting him of an offence under that Act and those Regulations. The appellant was using his mobile telephone to change the music to which he was listening. The music was being played over the sound system in his car. His mobile telephone was paired with the car sound system via Bluetooth. The issue is whether this was an "interactive communication" as required by the legislation for the offence to be committed...
In this case we are satisfied, for the reasons we have given, that the appellant's use of his mobile telephone led to him committing an offence pursuant to Regulation 110 in its current iteration. The answer to the question posed by the Magistrates' Court is "yes". The appellant was rightly convicted. We dismiss this appeal.
Leigh v Commissioner for the Police of the Metropolis [2022] EWHC 527 (Admin)
... The claimants are members of an informal collective that goes by the name #ReclaimTheseStreets which planned to hold a vigil on Clapham Common, prompted by Sarah Everard’s disappearance. The date set for the vigil was 13 March 2021. Its purposes were to highlight risks to women’s safety and to campaign for changes in attitudes and responses to violence against women. The claimants advertised the event, and large numbers showed an interest in attending. In the event the claimants abandoned their plans. In this judicial review claim they allege that their plans were unlawfully thwarted by officers of the Metropolitan Police Service (“MPS”) for whose conduct the defendant Commissioner is responsible in law...
...It is plain from my Lord’s judgment, that the first four decisions of the MPS had a chilling effect on the claimants in relation to the exercise of their Article 10 and 11 rights. It was for that reason that they made the urgent application to the High Court on 12 March 2021. Once it had been established during that hearing that the principles in Dolan and Ziegler applied and that a case-specific proportionality assessment by the MPS was a legal requirement, it was plainly incumbent on the police to engage with the organisers in exploring precautionary measures, to see whether the event could go ahead in some appropriate form. Instead, the contemporaneous documents show that the MPS focused on issuing their press release, which did nothing to reverse the chilling effect of their earlier stance, and on reiterating that they could not give assurances regarding enforcement. Against the background of what had taken place prior to the High Court hearing, the police failed to engage properly with the claimants on the issue of appropriate measures to mitigate health risks of the public attending a vigil on Clapham Common and then to assess the residual risk taking such measures into account...
Other
'Top criminal law firm fined £98k after cyber attack led to court bundles being leaked on dark web'
One of the country’s leading criminal law firms has been hit with a £98,000 fine after hackers were able to access court bundles and place some of them on the dark web. The ransomware attack on Tuckers Solicitors resulted in the encryption of 972,191 individual files, of which 24,712 related to court bundles.
The Information Commissioner Officer (ICO) found that 60 files were exfiltrated and published on underground data marketplaces. Of those, 15 were criminal matters, all but one of which had concluded, and 45 civil cases which were a mixture of old and ongoing matters. The incident occurred in August 2020. The bundles included a comprehensive set of personal data, including medical files, witness statements, name and addresses of witnesses and victims, and the alleged crimes of the individuals, according to the penalty notice. Although experts couldn’t say for certain how the attackers were able to access the firm’s network, they did find evidence of a known system vulnerability — a security update (otherwise known as a patch) released in January 2020 but not applied until some five months later in June.