R v Inwood
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE SCARMAN,LORD JUSTICE LAWTON |
| Judgment Date | 10 October 1974 |
| Neutral Citation | [1974] EWCA Crim J1010-14,[1974] EWCA Crim J1010-8,[1974] EWCA Crim J1010-11,[1974] EWCA Crim J1010-12,[1974] EWCA Crim J1010-10 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1974] EWCA Crim J1010-9 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Docket Number | No. 518/B/74 |
| Date | 10 October 1974 |
[1974] EWCA Crim J1010-10
Lord Justice Lawton
Lord Justice Scarman
and
Mr. Justice Dunn
No. 518/B/74
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
MR.B. BUCKLEY appeared on behalf of the Appellant.
Lord Justice Scarman will deliver the judgment of the Court.
This is an appeal against sentence. It is a tragic case, and it has been, if he will allow me to say- so, beautifully argued by Mr. Buckley, who, absolutely rightly, from the point of view of his client, has stressed the personal tragedy of the appellant.
The facts are these. On 12th December last year at the Crown Court at Maidstone, the appellant, Roland Joseph Inwood, pleaded guilty before His Honour Judge Streeter, to twelve offences of what in the old days would have been called fraud. Eight of them were offences of obtaining money by deception, three were offences of attempting to obtain money by deception, and one was an offence of obtaining money by false pretences. By these twelve offences the appellant obtained from the various people concerned the total sum of £5775. He asked for 38 other similar offences to be taken into consideration; that is to say, the sentencing Judge had to consider not only the twelve offences in the indictment, but at the request of the appellant, thirty eight other similar offences. All these offences were committed over a period of some five years between 1968 and 1973. The total sum, we are told, that the appellant obtained by this lengthy course of fraud was just over £15,000, and, had his criminal attempts been successful, he would have obtained a further £15,500. Thus the learned Judge had before him a very serious case of sustained fraud, involving considerable sums of money. He sentenced the appellant to a total of four years' imprisonment, and made a compensation order.
I can take the facts of the offences very shortly indeed. It is necessary, for a proper understanding of them to say something about the antecedents and record of the appellant. He was born in Belgium, and had the French name 'Dupres'. He acquired a diploma in Engineering in Belgium. He soon obtained experience as a draughtsman and as an electrical designer for industrial purposes and his last honest employment was as an electrical design engineer with a firm of consulting engineers in this country. A large part of that firm's business was concerned with building projects in Europe, and he learned how a consulting engineer conducted his business.
Unfortunately in 1967 he became redundant, and his employment ceased. In 1967 he was already nearly fifty years old. It is clear that the shock of redundancy and the loss of a professional career, as well as the loss of income, had a grave effect upon him, and there was medical evidence of certain psychological weaknesses in him. Certainly within a year of his being declared redundant, be had begun the course of criminal activity, some details of which I will now describe.
There is no need for me to prolong this judgment by detailing each of the twelve offences to which he pleaded guilty nor is it necessary for me to give any account of the 38 other offences which he asked to be taken into consideration. Suffice it to say that the nature of the frauds was this. He would go to small family businesses engaged in the building trade. Of course he would be able to present himself to a director or manager of such a business with the aura of his professional experience behind him, and with the capacity to mention names in Europe with whom, he could indicate he was associated. He did not have to stretch his 'Walter Mitty' personality very far to carry out that type of swindle for this was a world in which he had played an important part.
He interested these small businesses in the prospect of building contracts. No doubt he was assisted by the closer economic relationship developing between this country and the countries of Western Europe. It must have seemed very much to the future advantage of these small businesses to get a toe, a. foot-hold, in possible European investment in this country. He would suggest to the director or the manager to whom he was talking that some small expenditure would be needed, in order to promote this business development, to defray certain necessary introductory expenses. In mine of the cases covered by the indictment, the fish took the bait, and some money was put up by the firm and received by the appellant. In no single case was the sum of money very great. They varied, looking at the indictment, from one case in which £85 was obtained to some three cases in each of which over £1,000 was obtained. As I said, the total upon the indictment was a sum of £5,775.
In addition to the sentence of imprisonment the Judge also made a compensation order. The compensation order came to be made in these circumstances. It clearly appeared wise to those advising the appellant to suggest to the Court that there was a real prospect of the amounts of these defalcations being made good by the appellant. They were in this difficulty. The appellant had no means. He had no capital. He had been living dishonestly on his wits for a period of some five years, earning through his dishonesty something like £3,000 a year. So the prospects of any compensation being obtained from resources under the control of the appellant were not only negligible; they just did not exist.
But his family, particularly as we understand it the Belgian members of his family, were prepared to help him and his children, and it was made plain to the sentencing Judge that there was a real expectation that one member of the Belgian side of the Appellant's family would find the money to repay some £12,000 odd of the monies which he had obtained by his fraudulent means. The sentencing Judge was provided with a statement of account, which this Court has now before it; this was a statement of the sums of money which it was hoped and believed, and perhaps even expected, the Belgian side of his family would be prepared to find. The first part of the statement sets out the amounts detailed in the indictment, sums to which I have already referred, namely £577 5. The second part of the statement of account deals with sums of money which were the subject matter of the offences taken into consideration. If one adds these sums to the money covered by the indictment, one reaches a total of £12,682.50. It was ultimately suggested that this sum of money might appropriately be made the subject of a compensation order.
The learned trial Judge dealt with this aspect of his sentence in this way. When the matter was first canvassed before him, a slightly different figure was in mind, and of course at that date none of this money had been found. He allowed an adjournment to see what might happen. At the adjourned hearing the money had still not been found and he proceeded to deal with sentence and to make a compensation order, which was later adjusted to the figures that I have mentioned. So at the end of the day the appellant was sentenced to four years' imprisonment, and was made subject to a compensation order for £12,682.50.
Mr. Buckley's submission to this Court is primarily and principally a submission as to the term of imprisonment passed. He stressed the personal tragedy of the appellant, and he referred this Court, absolutely correctly, to the previous good character of the appellant and also to certain medical evidence which was given at the trial. Dr. Wolff was called and spoke of the existence of a personality disorder, a disorder well known in these Courts, and often described as a 'Walter Mitty' personality. He had the habit of indulging in romantic fantasies about himself and the events of his life, and was anxious to maintain, well beyond the facts of his career, a distinction and an eminence which was not his to command. It was suggested that the shock of redundancy imposed upon his fragile and fantasy-making personality was a matter of mitigation when one came to consider his sentence. He also has a hearing difficulty. It was, however, significant that, When Dr. Wolff himself was asked whether he could recommend either treatment or a psychiatrist who could offer a prospect of treatment, he hesitated. He could offer no hope, though he could not rule out the possibility of treatment being found for him some day.
In our view, however tragic this case, the gravity of the whole string of offences covering a period of five years is such that a custodial sentence was imperative in order to mark public disapproval of conduct of this nature. Was the sentence too long? £30,000 was at risk: £15,000 was lost by innocent victims, and the crimes were committed over a period of five years. Those facts alone indicate with clarity that a sentence of four years' imprisonment cannot be challenged as wrong in principle. We have listened, I hope with sympathy and understanding, to the mitigating factors urged upon us by Mr. Buckley. But in the balance that the Court has to make between the mitigating factors and society's interest in marking its disapproval for this type of conduct, we come to the irresistible though unpalatable conclusion, that we must not yield to the mitigating factors. The sentence was correct in principle when measured against the gravity of the offences. So far therefore as this appeal is concerned with the term of imprisonment imposed, it fails.
That leaves for consideration the problem of the compensation order. Compensation orders present new and unfamiliar problems for sentencing courts. We think it important that these orders should be made only when it is plain that they fall...
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