The Defence Brief

Insurance is a contract that remains in force until it expires or is cancelled As you may, or may not, know I specialise in motoring law and most of my work involves defending people accused of drink driving . With the drink driving often come other road traffic offences such as driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. It’s driving without insurance I want to talk about today because I think far too many police officers, solicitors, barristers and judges miss a key legal point when looking at these cases. I’ve received prosecution papers today for somebody accused of driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. The no insurance element is claim that the suspect did not tell the insurer about the disqualification. In his statement, the police officers says, “ [I] contacted [the insurer] who called me back informing me they would not consider the insurance policy valid as there were no convictions disclosed.” Looks like an open an...

Dr Evil Brendan McCarthy, who self-styles himself Dr Evil, has entered a guilty plea to causing grievous bodily harm on several people. There’s nothing exceptional about that, except that all of Dr Evil’s victims not only asked to be seriously wounded… they actually paid for the privilege! Mr McCarthy is a tattoo artist from Wolverhampton who offered body modification to his customers. This includes tattoos, piercings and tongue splitting as well as genital beading, ear modifications and nipple removal. It seems to have been the tongue splitting, ear modification and nipple removals that formed the basis of the case against him. Dr Evil's menu Dr Evil was charged with assault occasioning grievous bodily harm, which is an offence contrary to sections 18 and 20 of the Offence Against the Person Act 1861; I gather from the press reports that Mr McCarthy was charged with the more serious version under section 18, which reads, “Whosoever shall unlawfully and ma...

As police investigate forensic experts it is ever more important to challenge scientific evidence   You may, or may not, know that I specialise in motoring law and that my practice has a particular emphasis on drink driving, drug driving and the associated offences . Because these offences usually require some scientific enquiry to be conducted to prove guilt, they frequently include forensic evidence and today I want to look at how courts deal with forensic evidence and challenges to it. Let’s assume that somebody has been arrested for drink driving and, for whatever reason, the police have taken blood to assess how much alcohol is in his body. The prosecution will usually provide a document called an SFR1, which is a summary of the scientific examiner’s findings. It is not a document that is admissible itself, although it can be admitted if all parties agree. If a party does not agree to the summary being admitted then the prosecution ask the expert to produce an SFR2...

Does the law protect police drivers from prosecution?   The Metropolitan Police – that’s the one’s in London if you didn’t know – have released a video showing their officers using police cars to ram moped and motorcycle riders from their bikes. Watching the video with no context you could be forgiven for concluding that these are unreasonably heavy handed tactics that put lives at risk; however, police officers who I trust to know about these things have told me that these tactics are only used to end protracted chases where members of the public are put at risk and to catch the most dangerous offenders. The police conduct risk assessments as events are unfolding both by officers involved in the pursuit and by senior officers back at the police station monitoring events. This post is not about whether those tactics are right or wrong, instead I want to look at the potential legal consequences for police officers taking these actions and what, if anything, the law can...

To what extent is justice aided or hindered by press restriction? Since the arrest and imprisonment of Tommy Robinson for contempt of court there has been a lot of complaints from members of the public both in the UK and abroad who are concerned that a “journalist” could be imprisoned for doing their job in the UK. Americans seem particularly shocked at what has happened, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to investigate the law and consider why it is as it is. What is the law in the UK? Criminal contempt is a common law offence that involves a serious interference with the administration of justice or creates a real risk that the administration of justice will be prejudiced. It cannot be a mere non-compliance with court orders. Insofar as journalists and other publishers of news content go, section 1 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 is very important because it tells us that where information is published with the intention of it being consumed by the public at l...

Kemi Badenoch MP Kemi Badenoch, Conservative MP for Saffron Walden and, bizarrely for an MP with just a few months experience, Conservative Party vice-chairman with responsibility for selecting candidates in the 2022 election today confessed that ten-years ago she hacked into the website of a Labour MP to make changes to that MP’s website to “say nice things about Tories”. This is a problem for two reasons so far as I can see. First, we live in a climate where allegations of underhand and barely legal election tactics are thrown about regularly, apparently with some evidence to suggest that they are more than just allegations. Do we really want people in the House of Commons and at the top of the governing party who have confessed to engaging in completely illegal behaviour to influence voters? Secondly, I mentioned that this sort of thing is illegal because it is a serious offence. It would appear likely that the MP whose website was hacked was Harriet Harman, then de...

A suffragette being arrested in 1914 We are approaching the one hundredth anniversary of women first winning the right to vote, albeit in 1918 only land-owning women aged over 30 were to be given the right to vote. The right to vote was won by campaigners who fought, often literally, for the rights of women. Many women were arrested, tried and convicted of criminal offences in respect of their protests and now, a century later, there are calls for them to be pardoned for their crimes as homosexual men were for theirs. Amber Rudd has promised only today that she will look at individual cases. But, what is a pardon? Strictly speaking, a pardon is an exercise of the Royal prerogative of mercy. It does not expunge a conviction, nor does it mean that the person pardoned was not guilty of an offence. A pardon simply removes from the convicted person all penalties and punishments arising from the conviction. In ye olden days it was thus a legal instrument used by the monarch ...

Royal Courts of Justice There’s been an argument between police officers and lawyers over the past couple of days on Twitter over whether an acquittal means somebody is actually innocent versus whether a conviction means somebody is actually guilty. In law the position is quite clear, if you are convicted you are guilty; if you are acquitted you are innocent (you may already be shouting at me that “not guilty” does not equate to innocent but you are wrong – everybody is presumed innocent until convicted. If you are not convicted, then you are innocent in law thus a finding of not guilty maintains a defendant’s innocence and you can properly say that a person found not guilty is innocent). One of the more interesting points raised in the police v lawyer debate is that a person can be acquitted in a criminal court but convicted in a civil court. I think it’s an argument that is strong on its face but when looked at in more detail is quite weak. So, it’s worth exploring in a...

Tramadol tablets Big news in the UK today is the case of Laura Plummer, a 33 year old British woman who managed to “accidentally” plead guilty to importing Tramadol painkiller tablets into Egypt in a bizarre misunderstanding on Christmas Day. She has now been sentenced to three years imprisonment by the court. In Egypt it seems that the possession and importation of Tramadol is banned without a special prescription because it is widely abused in that country. Ms Plummer has said that she did not know the medication was illegal in Egypt and had taken it into the country for her Egyptian boyfriend, Omar Caboo, who is also 33 years old. According to the news reports I’ve read of Ms Plummer’s account and those given by her family to explain her actions, Ms Plummer obtained the drugs from a friend here in the UK. It is unclear whether that friend was in possession of a prescription nor, if they were, how it came to be that they built up such an extensive stockpile if they genuinely...

Serious questions for police following Liam Allen acquittal The Times front page carries a startling report today of a rape trial that ended in acquittal of the defendant, Liam Allan, on the second day of trial after the police revealed a cache of messages obtained by them from the complainant’s telephone that they had decided to withhold from both the prosecutor and the defence. It seems that in Mr Allan’s case the police had seized the complainant’s mobile telephone as evidence and interrogated it to obtain all messages contained therein. What happened next is unclear, the least damaging (to the police officers involved) theory is that they simply did not bother to read the messages. I’ll leave you to work out other possibilities. On day one of the trial, the complainant (who is still entitled to anonymity despite the prosecution being so sure that her allegations were entirely fabricated that they felt compelled to offer no evidence against the defendant) gave evidence ...