Atkinson v DPP
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE AULD,MR JUSTICE PITCHERS |
| Judgment Date | 12 May 2004 |
| Neutral Citation | [2004] EWHC 1457 (Admin) |
| Docket Number | CO/876/2004 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court) |
| Date | 12 May 2004 |
[2004] EWHC 1457 (Admin)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
DIVISIONAL COURT
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Auld
Mr Justice Pitchers
CO/876/2004
MISS K MOSS (instructed by Messrs Lamport Bassitt, Southampton, SO17 1AX) appeared on behalf of the CLAIMANT
MR N PRESTON (instructed by CPS, Harrow) appeared on behalf of the DEFENDANT
Section 127 of the Magistrates Courts Act 1980 provides that:
"…. a magistrates' court shall not try an information or hear a complaint unless the information was laid, or the complaint made, within 6 months from the time when the offence was committed."
Before the advent of present day computer technology, a written information was laid by delivering it either by post or by hand to the magistrates' court where it would or should be stamped with the date of its receipt for later incorporation in a summons. In R v Manchester Stipendiary Magistrates, ex parte Hill [1983] AC 328, HL, Lord Roskill, with whom the other law Lords agreed, held that a written information is laid for the purpose of section 127 when it is received at the office of the clerk to the justices for the relevant area. If it is received out of time, a recipient of the summons issued as a result of it may invite the magistrates not to proceed with the matter for want of jurisdiction. That is how the matter should be considered, as it was in ex parte Hill, not as an issue of abuse of process as the District Judge appears to have done in this case. The threshold notion of jurisdiction is usually, as in the case of section 127, capable of ready identification and application. Only if there is jurisdiction, may the more elastic notion of abuse of process arise for consideration.
Nowadays there is a computer system, to which the police and magistrates have access, in which the police may enter details of an alleged offence which, as they enter them, are at the same time entered on the computer at the magistrates' court. It appears that this can, if the circumstances require it, be done in an incomplete way, requiring a further entry or entries before all the details necessary for the information are present. Once the police consider that all the details necessary to constitute an "information" are included, they "validate" the information. Thereafter, it is for someone in the clerk's office at the magistrates' court to print a summons. At the head of the printed summons there is an "Information Date", which is the date of the initial police entry. But, if the police have had to make further entries, either to complete necessary further details not to hand on that date or, say, to amend or correct a faulty information, the effective date of laying the information may be later than that shown as such at the head of the summons. Thus, the initial data entry date shown on the summons is not necessarily the date for the laying of the information for the purpose of section 127.
It appears that any subsequent entries prior to and including validation of the information are contained in the computer system itself. But, unless there is evidence of that, and there was not in this case, it may not be possible for the prosecution to establish to the criminal standard of proof the exact date when the information was effectively laid.
That may be important in a case like this, where the information is laid, or allegedly laid, by computer within a short time before the end of the six months' limitation period set by section 127. The initial data entry recording that exercise may, for all the recipient of the summons knows, have been insufficiently complete so as to require later completion, or it may have been incorrect so as to require later correction by a further data entry. In either case such further entry may have been made after the effluxion of the 6 months' time limit.
The matter comes before the Court as an appeal by David Atkinson by way of case stated by District Judge Day from his ruling in the Ealing Magistrates' Court on 14 August 2003 that a prosecution should proceed against Mr Atkinson for the summary offence of carrying an insecure load, contrary to Regulation 100(2) of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986 and section 42 of the Road Traffic Act 1988. At an adjourned hearing before a different Ealing bench, one of lay magistrates, on 16 September 2003, Mr Atkinson was convicted of the offence and fined.
The date of the alleged offence was 16 June 2002. The information date printed at the head of the summons was 10 December 2002; that is six days before the effluxion of the six months' limitation period. The summons, which was dated 9 January 2002, included a statement of facts. It also bore the date when the information was printed, 20 December 2003; that is four days outside the limit. As the District Judge observed in his statement of case, the significance of that date is that, on the evidence before him, the summons could not have been generated before then. And, at any time from the initial information data entry shown on the summons of 10 December 2002 up to then, it would have been possible for the police, as part of the process on the way to validation, to have added to the information or to have changed it, effectively delaying the date of its laying for this purpose.
As I have indicated, there was no evidence before the District Judge of what, if any, details had been added or changes made after the initial information data entry shown on the summons of 10 December 2002.
Mr Atkinson sought a stay of the proposed prosecution as an abuse of process on the ground that he was unable to discover, on the material before the court, the precise date of the laying of the information, given that it could have been added to or amended up to 20 December 2002, four days outside the time limit. He made no allegation of bad faith. His case was simply that, as he could not go behind what was shown on the summons to establish whether there had been any addition to or alteration of the information after the initial information entry date shown at the head of it, he was deprived of a possible defence and that any doubt on the matter should be resolved in his favour. The prosecution agreed that, on the material before the court, there could have been such an amendment, but simply asserted, as was the case, that...
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