Issue 301  8th July 2023

Communities across England and Wales will see more police patrolling antisocial behaviour hotspots and perpetrators will face tougher, swifter consequences... From this week onwards, 16 police force areas, including Cleveland, Derbyshire and Northumbria, will be launching either ‘hotspot’ policing initiatives or ‘immediate justice’ schemes. These will see offenders of antisocial behaviour made to wear high-vis vests and repair damage they’ve caused to the community – for example washing police cars, cleaning up graffiti and local parks, or litter picking.

‘Immediate justice’ programmes are already underway in Sussex and Derbyshire, and aim for offenders to start work as little as 48 hours after they’ve committed a crime, so that victims know antisocial behaviour is treated seriously. The reparative activity will be up to each force or local council to decide but should be visible to the public, with the community and victims getting a say in the kind of clean-up or repairs undertaken. This will help to restore public confidence that people will be held accountable for their crimes, in turn helping to strengthen communities and build a better future.

The hotspot policing schemes will see an increase in the number of police patrols in areas with the highest rates of antisocial behaviour, with resource focused on locations where incidents are more frequent such as public transport or parks – helping to step up enforcement action and deter crimes from being committed in the first place so that people feel safer in their communities.

A police officer is replacing a lawyer as the director of the Serious Fraud Office. Nick Ephgrave QPM will take up the role at the end of September, the attorney general announced today. He will replace Lisa Osofsky, who took the reins of the SFO at the end of August 2018. Ephgrave, who will be in the role for an initial term of five years, has chaired the National Police Chiefs’ Council Criminal Justice Co-ordination Committee and held roles on the Criminal Procedure Rules Committee and the Sentencing Council.

The CBA Chair, Officers and Executive Committee congratulate Mary Prior KC of The 36 Crime Group on her nomination and uncontested election to Vice Chair of the CBA. Mary will assume the role of Vice Chair from 1st September 2023 and Chair from 1st September 2024.

The role of lawyers in the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history will start to come under the spotlight this week, as the Post Office IT inquiry moves into a new stage. The statutory inquiry has previously focused on the actions of the Post Office in the wrongful prosecutions of around 700 sub-postmasters accused of fraud and theft based on the now-discredited Horizon accounting software. But the 20-year scandal has also involved lawyers throughout, be it from the contracts drawn up between the Post Office and postmasters through to the appeal proceedings which cleared those falsely accused. The ethics of in-house lawyers and the extent to which they challenge their paymasters may also be examined in greater detail.

A financial market trader’s convictions have been referred to the Court of Appeal after a wide-ranging and complex review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). Tom Hayes was found guilty in 2015 of multiple charges of conspiracy to defraud by “rigging” the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR). He served five and a half years in a UK prison and was released in January 2021...

The CCRC has concluded that there is a real possibility that the Court of Appeal will prefer the legal approach to the definition and operation of the LIBOR rules taken by the US Court and overturn Mr Hayes’ conviction...

The mother of Stephen Lawrence has said it was a “disgrace” for prosecutors to decide not to bring charges against four senior detectives accused of bungling the first investigation into the teenager’s murder. The Crown Prosecution Service spent more than two years considering whether the errors made in the weeks after the 18-year-old was murdered were so serious that they amounted to the criminal offence of misconduct in public office.

Lawrence, 18, was stabbed to death by a racist gang of at least five white youths in south-east London on 22 April 1993. It took 19 years for two members of the gang of five or six to be convicted of his murder, and a public inquiry found a string of errors by police. The four detectives have all retired and were in charge of the inquiry, which was heavily criticised by the Macpherson report. Errors made meant that despite the suspects being named by local people, they remained free. The decision to refer the case to prosecutors follows a criminal investigation conducted by the National Crime Agency... Stephen’s mother, Doreen Lawrence, said she would seek a review of the decision not to prosecute.