R Hutt v Parole Board of England and Wales
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | JUDGE,Dight |
| Judgment Date | 17 January 2018 |
| Neutral Citation | [2018] EWHC 141 (Admin) |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court) |
| Docket Number | CO/4070/2017 |
| Date | 17 January 2018 |
[2018] EWHC 141 (Admin)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
THE ADMINISTRATIVE COURT
Royal Courts of Justice
HIS HONOUR JUDGE Dight CBE
(Sitting as a Judge of the High Court)
CO/4070/2017
APPEARANCES
Ms R Earis (instructed by Lansbury Worthington) appeared on behalf of the Claimant.
THE DEFENDANT did not attend and was not represented.
This is a challenge to the decision of the Parole Board made on 2 nd June 2017 by which it declined either to direct the applicant's release from custody or recommend his transfer to open conditions. The applicant asks that the decision be quashed and that the matter be remitted to a differently constituted panel so that the decision can be considered afresh insofar as the refusal to recommend transfer to open conditions is concerned, permission to bring the challenge having been granted by Mr Peter Marquand on paper on 3 rd October 2017.
Mr Marquand limited permission to the applicant's third ground of challenge relating to the refusal to recommend transfer to open conditions, on the grounds that the Parole Board had failed to carry out the required balancing exercise when considering whether to move the applicant to open conditions.
The Parole Board takes a neutral stance in this application, but in their pre-action protocol letter dated 20 th June 2017, which I have read carefully, they set out their detailed reasons why the applicant should not seek to review their decision. We are well beyond that point now.
Ms Earis, on behalf of the claimant, has made succinct and careful submissions on behalf of her client, emphasising the key points. I take much of this judgment from the documents which have been filed by the claimant and the submissions which have just been made.
The claimant is aged 43 and is currently a prisoner at HMP Wayland. In 1994, when aged 19, he was convicted of murdering his stepmother and sentenced to imprisonment for life with a minimum term of 12 years. His tariff expired on 1 st July 2005. He has, however, now spent more than 24 years in prison. While in detention he has acquired an addiction to prescription painkillers. He has been placed in open conditions on six occasions and has each time been moved back to closed conditions after what may be referred to as drug-related incidents.
The present challenge arises out of an oral hearing which took place before the Parole Board on 31 st May 2017 at which the claimant sought his release or transfer to open conditions. The Parole Board had previously declined to recommend his release in a decision dated 13 th November 2009, a decision which was in fact quashed and referred for reconsideration. In the current decision letter of 2 nd June 2017 the Board declined again to recommend his release on licence.
That element of the decision, is not, for the reasons I have already given, open to challenge now in this court; but it is the second element, the refusal to recommend transfer to open conditions, which is challenged on the basis of a failure to carry out the appropriate balancing exercise and/or give reasons for the refusal to make the recommendation to transfer.
The decision letter, as Ms Earis has pointed out, refers to the application for transfer to open conditions in only two places in the course of its eight pages. The first is in the section headed “Introduction” where, in the second paragraph, the Parole Board wrote:
“In order to direct release the panel must be satisfied that it is no longer necessary for the protection of the public for you to remain confined. In order to recommend a transfer to open conditions the panel is required to consider the extent of your progress in addressing and reducing your risks, the extent to which you are likely to comply with any form of temporary release from open conditions, the degree of risk that you might abscond and the benefit of testing you in a less secure environment.”
It is common ground that those are factors to which the Parole Board is obliged to have regard in carrying out the appropriate balancing exercise when considering an application to transfer to open conditions.
Section 2 of the letter identifies the evidence which the panel looked at. Section 3 analysed the claimant's offending. Section 4 is headed “Risk factors”, but those factors were plainly related to the application for release rather than the application for transfer to open conditions. Section 5 is headed “Evidence of change since last review and/or circumstances leading to recall (where applicable) and progress in custody”. Section 6 is headed “Panel's assessment of current risk”, section 7, “Evaluation of effectiveness of plans to manage risk”, all of which related to the first head of the application for release. Section 8 is headed “Conclusion and decision of panel” and sets out the reasons in some detail why the panel declined to order the claimant's release. The last three sentences set out the conclusion which the panel reached, in the following way:
“Therefore the panel does not direct your...
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