Court of Appeal
| Author | Tony Storey |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022018317722851 |
| Published date | 01 August 2017 |
| Date | 01 August 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Case Notes |
Case Note
Court of Appeal
Drug-Free Zone: Court of Appeal Confirms that
Voluntary Intoxication is not Relevant in Cases of
Diminished Responsibility
RvKay [2017] EWCA Crim 647
Keywords
Manslaughter, diminished responsibility, recognised medical condition, intoxication
Robert Kay (K) was a paranoid schizophrenic (although this condition was not formally diagnosed until
after his arrest). He had long-standing mental health problems and had been in ‘contact with mental
health services’ over the years but had not ‘responded meaningfully to any of the many offers of help
made to him’ (at [4]). He was also a habitual drug user, having started glue-sniffing at 13, drinking
alcohol at 15 and taking drugs at 18. His usual drug was heroin but he also regularly injected amphe-
tamine. K, who was 48 on the day of the killing, had therefore been using drugs for his entire adult life,
over 30 years. He knew that drug use (particularly amphetamines) triggered and exacerbated his symp-
toms (such as hallucinations and hearing voices), and he recognised this by abstaining from taking
amphetamines ‘on a number of occasions and for substantial periods’ over the years because of their
‘markedly deleterious effect on his behaviour’ (at [5]).
Nevertheless, in June 2015, K spent 3 days on a ‘bender’ consuming ‘copious’ amounts of alcohol and
taking ‘multiple’ drugs including heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and ecstasy in Lytham St Annes in
Lancashire. This triggered a psychotic episode. On the morning of 18 June, K had visited a friend where
they shared a few cans of Tennents super strength lager. He told her that he was the son of Satan who
could communicate with the devil via a TV transmission box in a carrier bag. Around lunchtime, she
asked him to leave. He later spent time drinking with another friend in a flat. He claimed to have a list of
instructions from Satan and armed himself with a ‘large kitchen knife’ before leaving. The friend was
later to tell the Crown Court that ‘He was looking through me, like I wasn’t there. It was very, very
weird. I could sense something terrible was going to happen’. Soon afterwards, as K walked down an
alleyway, he spotted Ian Dollery (D), a complete stranger, working in his garage. K entered the garage
and stabbed D 35 times in the face, chest, abdomen, arms and legs in a ‘frenzied and brutal’ attack. D’s
wife and daughter witnessed part of the atta ck. They managed to get K out of the garage usin g a
broomstick, but it was too late to save D, who died in hospital the next day.
K was charged with murder and appeared before HHJ Brown and a jury at Preston Crown Court in
July 2016. There, he admitted killing D but denied murder. Instead, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter on
grounds of diminished responsibility (DR) under s. 2(1) of the Homicide Act 1957 (as amended). The
defence case was that on 18 June 2015 K had suffered an ‘abnormality of mental functioning’ (the
The Journal of Criminal Law
2017, Vol. 81(4) 258–261
ªThe Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0022018317722851
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