R v Inder
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE |
| Judgment Date | 25 November 1977 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1977] EWCA Crim J1125-2 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Date | 25 November 1977 |
| Docket Number | No. 5709/C/76 |
[1977] EWCA Crim J1125-2
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
The Lord Chief Justice of England (Lord Widgery)
Lord Justice Bridge
and
Mr. Justice May
No. 5709/C/76
MR. GUTHRIE-JONES, Q.C. appeared for the Appellant.
MR. P.J. BUCKNELL appeared for the Crown.
(As approved by Judge.)
In October of last year at the Central Criminal Court, this Appellant stood his trial on an indictment containing seven effective counts. On the first he was found guilty of buggery of a boy called Malcolm-Ward; on the second he was found guilty of indecent assault with the same boy; on the third he was found guilty of indecent assault of John Ward and on the fourth he was acquitted of a similar indecency charge relating to a boy called Errol Bent; on the fifth he was found guilty of indecent assault on David Brennan; on the sixth he was found guilty of indecent assault on John Keeley and on the seventh there was an acquittal in relation to another of the Ward brothers, Mark Ward, in respect of whom the Appellant had been charged with a similar offence. He appeals against conviction and substantial sentences of imprisonment which were imposed following those convictions.
The case can be reduced to a relatively small compass, although it covered a great deal of ground and presented many problems. I say it presented many problems because these six boys were living in the same place, three of them were brothers living in the same house the Appellant lived in. Any experienced criminal judge looking at the bare facts as I have recited them so far would realise this was going to be an extremely difficult case for a judge to try. It was going to bristle with all sorts of problems about admissibility of evidence, requirements of corroboration and the like.
In the event the Appellant has reduced his complaint relating to the conduct of the trial, and therefore reduced his grounds of appeal against conviction to basically two. That will enable us to deal with the matter in the same way and in, I hope, the same amount of detail.
The necessary background of the case was, as I have said, that the three Ward brothers, mentioned in the counts to which I have already referred, lived with their mother and father in a house where the Appellant at all material times also lived as a kind of lodger. In addition to the boys living in the house, he was friendly with some of the boys in the neighbour-hood. He had a very bad record for indecent assault upon small boys before he became known to the Ward family at all. In 1960 he was given four years' imprisonment for indecent assault on boys and in 1968 seven years for similar offences. They must have been grave offences to have attracted penalties of that nature. So one has this man with this record behind him living with this family with these boys.
When the matter came before the learned trial Judge, two major points were raised and they were the two major points to which I now address the judgment of this Court. First of all, the question arose whether reference could properly be made to the past record of similar offences against the accused in the present trial, and the second major point raised was how far the evidence of individual boys could be treated as corroborating the evidence of the other boys. That is an important point, clearly, because on the facts as I have recited them so far questions of corroboration loomed large in the trial of this case.
The lead-in, as it were, to the admission of the Appellant's past record sprang from the fact that in the case of one boy he said that the boy had faked an indecent assault by taking the Appellant's hand and putting it on the boy's privates and then blackmailing the Appellant saying that he would tell unless money was given to him and the other boys concerned. That evidence clearly shows an imputation of a bad character against a prosecution witness which would open the door to evidence of the past record of the Appellant being admitted if the Judge, having regard to the well-known con-siderations, thought it right and proper to let it in. It must have had a devastating consequence when the Judge decided that these past offences were to be disclosed, because one can hardly think of a situation more likely to prejudice the jury than admission of evidence of that kind unless, of course, extreme care was taken to prevent that prejudice from occurring.
The Judge decided that the evidence was to be let in on the basis of the attack upon the single prosecution witness, but he did not, as we think he might very well have and, indeed, should have done, bear in mind throughout the rest of the case the serious effect which that admission of evidence might have. In other words, although he was correctly telling the jury in respect of this evidence that they were not to regard that evidence as showing guilt of the accused by reason of his having committed similar offences before, and they were directed that this evidence was to enable them to see what kind of a man it was that was the subject of this attack yet the Judge did not have that important factor constantly in mind and occasionally (one mentions one example only) overstepped the mark and almost invited the jury to use this evidence in the way in which it should not be used.
The particular passage I have in mind from the summing-up is in these terms. He referred to the Appellant's recent return from prison and then he went on to say: "Of course, there was Douglas Inder having the dangers of his recent activities, certainly now in the past, finding himself, you may think, subject to a temptation which would require the...
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...incestuous father's 'stock in trade,' before one victim's evidence can be properly admitted upon the trial of another. See for example Reg. v. Inder (1978) 67 Cr.App.R. 143, and more recently Reg. v. Brooks (1990) 92 Cr. App. R. 36." 4After examining the features upon which the judge had f......
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