News
AGFS Announcement
After carefully considering the responses, the government will now spend an additional £8 million, bringing the total increase to £23 million. The money will be specifically targeted at junior advocates to support continued investment in the profession.
Announcing the move, Lord Chancellor David Gauke also today (24 November 2018) committed to bring forward a 1% increase on all fees to come into effect alongside the new scheme.
The revised scheme will be reviewed after 18 months.
the scheme will come into effect via an SI, scheduled to be laid in December
The specific details of the amendments have not been released yet.
New Sentencing Code Proposed
A new Sentencing Code will reduce the number of unlawful sentences being handed out and save £250 million over ten years, the Law Commission has announced today.
When they sentence offenders, judges have to contend with more than 1,300 pages of law filled with outdated and inaccessible language. This law is contained in over 65 different Acts of Parliament, and has no coherent structure. This makes it difficult for judges to identify and apply the law they need, which can slow the process of sentencing and lead to mistakes.
The Commission is recommending that anyone convicted from now on should be sentenced under a simplified and modern Sentencing Code. This would mean that judges would no longer need to search back through layers of old law.
'Scrap juries in rape trials to stop falling conviction rates, Labour MP says'
Society is reluctant to convict young men of “date rape” and a major review of the jury system is needed, a Labour MP has said.
Ann Coffey said that rape myths including "women invite rape by what they wear" or "real rapes are done by strangers in alleyways" were dominant in society and juries were taking these views in to court.
She said that an urgent independent inquiry was needed into the use of juries in rape cases in the UK in a bid to "forge a better public understanding of rape myths".
Gang Matrix Breached Data Protection
The Metropolitan police’s list of gang suspects breached data protection laws, potentially causing damage and distress to a disproportionate number of young black men, an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found.
The ICO investigation found that the gang matrix failed to distinguish between victims of crime and offenders; some boroughs operated informal lists of people who no longer met the criteria for being on the matrix; and data was inappropriately shared with other public bodies.
Police Will Ram Mopeds
Extraordinary dashcam footage shows police pursuit drivers ramming fleeing moped thugs, sending them sprawling in the road. Police said the new strategy of ending pursuits with what the Met calls “tactical contact” was now in common use across London.
The Met say the tactics are being used by specially trained “Skorpion” drivers and are designed to quickly end pursuits before riders or the public are injured. Scotland Yard released the footage today with a warning to moped thugs that officers will pursue them even if they discard their helmets or ride dangerously.
Cases
R v Dreszer [2018] EWCA Crim 454
The core submission of Alun Jones QC is that there was a misdirection in relation to the approach to the appellant as a secondary party in the light of the Supreme Court's decision in Jogee.
Given that this was a case in which there was no witness to the actual killing and where the Crown could not specify what had caused the death or where it had occurred, the case depended on inferences which could be drawn from the evidence. In those circumstances, this was not the sort of case where we could have any confidence that the jury must have convicted on the basis of intention as opposed to foresight. Even though this was a case where the evidence available might well have led to a conclusion that the appellant participated with an intention that Mr Kulesza should be caused at least serious physical harm, the judge had considered it appropriate to leave the matter to the jury on the now forbidden foresight basis. He plainly had not ruled out such a possible basis of conviction and nor can we. In those circumstances, the misdirection of the jury cannot be overlooked and the conviction cannot be sustained as a safe one. Accordingly, the conviction for murder must be quashed.
Other
'An open letter to The Criminal Bar Association, The South Eastern Circuit and The Bar Council'
We write in relation to a case which has just collapsed at the Crown Court sitting at Inner London. We write to express our dismay at the remuneration under the new AGFS scheme and the consequences which will now follow.
But even more disgraceful are the rates of pay for such a serious case with thousands of pages of evidence and the fact that this trial has now ‘cracked’. With no provision for payment of Pages of Prosecution Evidence served (PPE), the brief fee is now only £1,105 (being a category 13.1 offence). Had the trial been contested, the brief fee would not have been much better (amounting to only £1,300). Both of these derisory figures amount to a reduction in advocates fees of approximately 80% as compared to the AGFS scheme which existed pre April 2018.
Obscurity
Pet Theft
A Private Members' Bill would make stealing a pet a separate criminal offence.
The draft Bill defines a pet as an animal that "provides companionship or assistance to any human being".
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