News
Ant Fined £86,000 For Drink Driving
TV presenter Ant McPartlin has been fined £86,000 and given a 20-month driving ban after pleading guilty to drink driving. The court heard he had been more than twice the drink drive limit.
A helpful blog post explaining how the fine was calculated can be read here.
Too Expensive to Delete Police Mugshots
Millions of police mugshots of innocent people cannot be deleted because it would be too expensive, a government minister has claimed – despite a High Court ruling that the practice is unlawful.
The work would have to be “done manually” by local forces, making the costs “difficult to justify”, a committee of MPs investigating the controversy has been told.
The Home Office has also admitted it has no idea how many people have successfully asked for their mugshots to be deleted – amid suspicions that the figure is very low.
'Criminal defence solicitors may be extinct in five years, says Law Society'
Criminal defence solicitors may become extinct in parts of England and Wales within five years, due to cuts to legal fees that have rendered the profession unprofitable, according to the Law Society.
The strongly worded warning comes as barristers have begun refusing to take on legal aid cases and are planning mass walk-outs in protest at what they say is sustained under-funding of criminal trials.
Cases
R v Miah [2018] EWCA Crim 563
We ultimately have to ask ourselves whether this conviction was safe. Regrettably, we have come to the conclusion that we cannot say this conviction is safe. That is by reason of the serious inadequacy of the summing-up. This was indeed a short trial. We can readily accept that the jury would have had all the evidence well in mind. It is also not difficult at all to accept Mr Hook's submission that this was potentially a very powerful prosecution case; and, as we have said, one can readily see the potential discrepancies and implausibilities in aspects of this appellant's evidence. But there is no sliding scale of justice in this context. Whether a defendant in a criminal trial has a strong defence or a weak defence, whether a trial is a long one or a short one, each such defendant is entitled to a fair, balanced and legally accurate summing-up. Indeed it might be said that just where a defendant has a very difficult defence case, all the more reason, if anything, for a scrupulously fair and balanced approach by the trial judge. In this particular case the Recorder not only failed - and significantly failed - to give the extremely important direction as to standard of proof; but that failure was then compounded by the unbalanced way in which he dealt with the defence case during the course of the summing-up: which rendered the lack of specific direction on standard of proof even more fundamental.
Obscurity
Throwing Anything at the Queen
Attempting to throw anything at the Queen with intent to injure her is contrary to section 2 of the Treason Act 1842, and will result in the offender being 'transported beyond the seas for the term of seven years'.