News
£15m to Fix Court Buildings
The extra money, announced by the Chancellor in this year’s Budget, will ensure more than 170 wide-ranging improvement works can be undertaken across a number of sites before the end of the financial year.
Some £4 million will be spent advancing the preparation of capital maintenance projects including replacing the roofs at Snaresbrook Crown Court - the first phase of a longer-term refurbishment programme at the court – and Winchester Crown Court. Other improvements will include new boilers at Newton Abbot, Peterlee and Plymouth Magistrates’ Courts, new windows at Barnstaple Magistrates’ Court and replacement lifts at Swansea Civil Justice Centre and Thames Magistrates’ Court.
New Framework for Domestic Abuse Prosecutions
Measures which have already helped to drive up prosecutions in domestic abuse cases are set to be rolled out across England and Wales.
At a pilot site in London, four measures which were put in place to increase support saw an almost eight per cent increase in guilty pleas and conviction rates. These included simple steps such as making sure victims were given the chance to visit court before the trial, given the option of giving evidence behind a screen and being allocated an independent Domestic Abuse Advisor to support them.
The measures – called the domestic abuse best practice framework – are to be introduced in domestic abuse courts across England and Wales from January.
'Plans for 2019 - The Online Court: will IT work?'
At the end of 2018, senior members of the judiciary did their best to allay the concerns expressed by judges for whom they were responsible. All members of the judiciary received an update from their head of division, summing up individual judges’ responses to the Judicial Way of Working papers (explained in the previous chapter) and outlining the senior judiciary’s plans for the year ahead. This chapter summarises what individual judges were told. It is based on updates that have not been published.
It was originally intended that all remand hearings in the magistrates’ courts should use the fully video model, with nobody present in court. That idea has been abandoned. The crime service model is being redesigned so that the bench has the information it needs to permit pleas to be taken and directions given at the first hearing.
Sir Brian promised that trials would not be conducted using the fully video model in the magistrates’ court or the Crown court, with the possible exception of some minor offences where the defendant lived a long way away. However, he thought that fully video hearings could be used in pre-trial hearings provided robust and effective technology was in place that the judiciary considered effective.
'Junior barristers call for return to action in legal aid row'
Nearly 200 junior criminal barristers have said they support a return to direct action in the new year if the legal aid funding crisis is not resolved.
The latest call to action appears in an open letter co-signed by 193 barristers addressed to Chris Henley QC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA). The juniors say discussions on potential action will resume in the New Year.
A copy of the letter can be found here.
Cases
R v TF [2018] EWCA Crim 2823
Following a trial before HHJ S Wright at Inner London Crown Court, the appellant was convicted by verdicts delivered over 23 and 24 March 2017 of 9 counts of indecent assault on males (some of whom were children at the time) and two counts of rape. The rape charges were counts 9 and 10, and it is in relation to them that this appeal proceeds, in the main.
The fresh ground was that counts 9 and 10 should have been charged as buggery pursuant to section 12(1) of the Sexual Offences Act 1956, whereas they were in fact charged as rape pursuant to s 1(1) of the Sexual Offences Act 1956; it was said that this was an error because the offence of rape did not include anal penetration until the law was amended by s 142 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which came into effect on 3 November 1994, which post-dated the offences in counts 9 and 10. Accordingly, it was said, the convictions on counts 9 and 10 were unsafe and should be quashed.
In our judgment, this is not a case where a conviction under s 12(1) for buggery can be substituted for a conviction under s 1(1) for rape. Rape of a woman by a man does not "ordinarily involve" an allegation of buggery by a man of another man (or boy). The two offences are different, indeed mutually exclusive. It cannot therefore be said, by reference to the charges on the indictment for rape, that the jury must have been satisfied of the facts necessary to support a conviction for buggery.
Other
'Rape myths and misconceptions'
What if I told you that some jurors do not decide cases on the evidence that they hear, but instead on entrenched prejudices and stereotypes that they cannot shake? That as far as those jurors are concerned, the calling of evidence does nothing more than pay lip-service to the concept of a fair trial? Would you be shocked that people could be convicted and imprisoned on the basis of prejudiced and stereotyped jury attitudes? Except that it’s not defendants who are at risk; instead the biases operate against women complainants in rape cases.
The research showed clear evidence of a relationship between psychological make-up, in particular the crime specific attitudes jurors bring with them to trial, and verdict outcomes. It amounts to clear scientific evidence that in acquaintance rape trials, the low conviction rates may be better accounted for by rape myth acceptance than by any evidence-based conclusion that the complainant was lying or that the jury were simply not sure beyond a reasonable doubt.
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