Attorney General's Reference 124 of 2008 (John Doran)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE HUGHES |
| Judgment Date | 11 November 2008 |
| Neutral Citation | [2008] EWCA Crim 2820 |
| Date | 11 November 2008 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Docket Number | No: 2008/4476/A7 |
[2008] EWCA Crim 2820
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London, WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Hughes
Mr Justice Plender
The Recorder of Brighton and Hove
(His Honour Judge Brown Qc)
(Sitting as a Judge of The Cacd)
No: 2008/4476/A7
Mr G Patterson appeared on behalf of the Attorney General
Mr J Woodcock appeared on behalf of the Offender
Her Majesty's Attorney General seeks leave to refer to this court a sentence of three years' custody imposed after a trial for conspiracy to rob. We give leave.
The conspiracy referred to events of a single day in June of 2007. The defendant Doran was party to two robberies that day. Both of them were targeted upon elderly householders in their own homes and both were committed by two men working together. It is plain that they were in a car cruising the Thames Valley area looking for suitable targets.
The first victim was a gentleman of 76 who lived in Tring. The robbers saw him get off a bus on his way home and they would have seen that he was using two walking sticks. They followed him into his house and began searching it for things to steal. A limited degree of force was applied to him when he tried to activate a fitted panic alarm. He was seized and gripped tightly by his forearms which left nasty bruises of which we have seen the photographs. Quite apart from the physical bruises, and really more importantly, he was as a result very unpleasantly shocked and, as so often, thereafter frightened of being in his home alone. He needed a prescription of some medication and he needed additional locks fitted, but the important thing is that the sense of security to which anybody is entitled in his own home had been weakened.
The second victim was some miles away in Henley. She was a lady of 86. In her case the robbers broke a window in her house and forced the front door; she found them in the house. She tried to push one of them away. They did not use force upon her. They did oblige her to sit down while a search was made and they pulled the telephone wires out of the socket. She was physically unhurt but inevitably was left worried and anxious about her personal security.
This defendant left traces by way of fingerprints and DNA material. Although he was identified reasonably promptly it was not apparently possible to arrest him for six months. He has never admitted his responsibility for these offences. He declined to answer questions when he was interviewed by the police and he pleaded not guilty at court, although he neither gave nor called evidence, nor was it necessary for either of the householders to have to come to court.
This defendant was born in February 1989, so he was eighteen-and-a-half at the time and 19 by the time he came to be sentenced. He comes from a travelling family. He has some previous convictions. They are not of the most serious but one in particular is directly relevant. We can, for all practical purposes, leave out of account a reprimand for shoplifting when he was 12 and a conviction for driving whilst disqualified—except to note that the latter resulted in a short custodial sentence which did not deter him from further offences. In 2005 when he was 16 he and another had committed a distraction burglary at the house of a gentleman of 78 years of age. There was not on that occasion any confrontation such as there was in both the cases with which we are dealing. It is however plainly a similar kind of offence. It is very likely to have involved selection of a vulnerable victim and to an extent the fact that on this occasion the householders were confronted demonstrates some escalation in the offending. On that occasion, as we have said, he was 16 and the sentence was a referral order. Lastly, as a matter of history he was on bail at the time that he committed the present offences—on bail however for a quite different kind of offence, namely the possession of cannabis.
The judge had in the pre-sentence report information about the defendant which she plainly regarded as giving some, albeit very limited and rather uncertain, scope for optimism that he might be motivated to change his pattern of behaviour. It is right that his family was well regarded by the pastor of a local church group who wrote to say so. Other references apparently in support of an old job application do not seem to us to take the matter any further at all.
Doran lived with his parents and he had since the offences in the intervening year or so formed a steady relationship with a girlfriend who lived with him. They were still together despite his arrest and she was present in court to support him. It was the fact that they had together suffered the misfortune of a stillbirth. He had been working in the intervening time for the young lady's father landscaping and in scrap metal dealing, which was the man's trade. The defendant has no educational qualifications but it is right to say that on remand he had applied himself to some extent, he had completed a numeracy course...
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R v Roe
...was a case of very limited violence. There were punches (two), in effect pushing the householder back into a chair. Attorney General's Reference No 124 of 2008 (Doran) [2008] EWCA Crim. 2820, was case of targeting the elderly but also one in which the violence was negligible. At the upper e......
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Attorney General's Reference (No's. 10 and 11 of 2009) R v O'Connor and Another
...culminating in a decision of this court in Attorney General's Reference No 124 of 2008, a judgment delivered 11th November 2008 [2008] EWCA Crim. 2820. The Vice President, Hughes LJ, giving the judgment of the court considered the level of sentences referred to in previous decisions and as......