R v B Prosecution Application for Leave to Appeal Terminating Ruling
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | SIR IGOR JUDGE |
| Judgment Date | 01 May 2008 |
| Neutral Citation | [2008] EWCA Crim 1144 |
| Docket Number | No: 200802227/D5 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Date | 01 May 2008 |
[2008] EWCA Crim 1144
Sir Igor Judge (President of The Queen's Bench Division)
Mr Justice Aikens
Mrs Justice Swift Dbe
No: 200802227/D5
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL CRIMINAL DIVISION
Mr T O'Dunohue appeared on behalf of the Applicant
Mr S Medland appeared on behalf of the Crown
: This is an appeal by the prosecution, under section 58 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, against a terminating ruling by His Honour Judge Rogers QC, dated 23rd April 2000.
The essential facts are not in dispute. The defendant is Robert Bill, a man aged 53. He was due to be tried by the judge and a jury in the Crown Court at Mold, listed to start on 23rd April 2008.
The indictment which Bill faced included two counts which had originally been placed on separate indictments but which had been joined after a full argument before the judge at an earlier hearing on 25th February. Both counts in the indictment alleged attempted abduction of a child. The first count alleged that this incident had occurred as long ago as 1st April 1995. The second count related to a similar offence, which was alleged to have occurred on 22nd June 2007.
The facts of the second count can be briefly summarised. As a trial will take place, we should say only the absolute minimum necessary to understand the nature of the allegation. On 22nd June a small child, 5 years old, at about 4.30 in afternoon had gone off to look for some little friends in a park. She was seen by her mother walking towards her home and as she walked there a dark colour Ford Estate car drove, as it is put in the written statements, suddenly onto the wrong side of the road and stopped adjacent to the pavement on which the little girl was walking, just a little ahead of her. So the normal continuation of her journey would have taken her past the car. The driver of the car was the defendant. He immediately left his car and opened a rear door, so that it looked as though the door was blocking the pavement and therefore the little girl's onward path towards home. She walked off the pavement around the car and then, quite by chance, she encountered an adult who was walking home as well. The adult saw the little girl talking to the defendant and the defendant talking to her, but because he is deaf, he could not hear what was being said. However he took the robust view that he should tell the little girl to get off home or get off down the road. The defendant then shut the open door and began to check his rear side tyre. The details need no further description. The Crown's case was that the defendant was behaving in this way in order to perpetrate the abduction of the little girl.
The defendant was arrested on 28th June. He said, when arrested, that he had not done anything, that it was nothing to do with him and he then was interviewed.
His case, as set out in the defence case statement, admits that he was the driver of the car at the time in question. The car had some problems with the braking system. He drove around. He did not know precisely where he was. He parked up in order to examine the braking problem. He accepts in the statement that children were about at the time, but that he had no recollection of speaking to the little girl.
We come now to the much earlier alleged incident which forms the basis of the allegation in count 1. A girl, then aged 10, was out of her home in a street in Rhyl at about 9.30 on an April evening looking for her younger brother. When she was two or three houses away from her own home, a car pulled up alongside her. There was a single male in the car. He spoke to her and asked for directions to the Sun Centre. She gave him those directions. He intimated that he could not understand what she was saying and so he asked her to show him using a map. He opened the rear door of the car on the passenger side and told her to get a map out of the car. She said that she could not see any map. According to her recent statement, she said: “As I did this the male began pushing me from behind, trying to get me in the car. I don't remember screaming but I remember seeing two neighbours … come running down the road towards me shouting. The male slammed the door shut, got in the car and drove off quickly.” She then gives a description of the male.
After this incident she went home and told her parents. The police were called. The police took her on a drive around Rhyl on a number of occasions in the following days to see whether she could see either the car or the driver of the car. She completed an E-Fit and she later went on to an identification parade. At that parade she did not pick out the defendant. She completed a video statement interview. Notes surrounding her complaint and the subsequent investigation were made by the investigating officer in his notebook. He conducted enquiries relating to cars, red Vauxhall Cavalier cars, with partial registration numbers consistent with that supplied to the police in North Wales, and he found one such car registered to the defendant. He went to the defendant's house. He noted in his notebook that there was what was described as a “remarkable likeness” of the E-Fit to the defendant. According to his statement: “The image was akin to a photograph of the defendant, even down to the detail on his metal framed glasses.” In short this case was, or would have been a case of an identification case. Not to make too fine a point of it, the Crown is seeking to have the defendant tried in relation to count 1, in an identification case some 12 years after the purported identifications were made.
The defendant was charged in 1995. He made several appearances in the Magistrates' Court. Eventually, however, the prosecution discontinued the case against him. There was no trial. The charge was revived by a recharge. As to the allegation, in his defence case statement, the defendant says that he recalls being interviewed by the police and saying to them that he had stopped in Rhyl, at the seafront, to go for a walk and had parked his car in a side street. He then explains in the defence case...
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