R v JW
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE TOULSON,MR JUSTICE McCOMBE |
| Judgment Date | 14 January 2009 |
| Neutral Citation | [2009] EWCA Crim 107 |
| Docket Number | No: 200805255 A2 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Date | 14 January 2009 |
[2009] EWCA Crim 107
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL CRIMINAL DIVISION
Before: Lord Justice Toulson
Mr Justice Mccombe
Mr Justice David Clarke
No: 200805255 A2
Mr H Blake-James appeared on behalf of the Applicant
Mr G McKinley appeared on behalf of the Crown
(Draft for approval)
: McCombe J will give the judgment of the court.
: On 21 July 2008 in the Crown Court at Woolwich before HHJ Byers, the present applicant pleaded guilty to three offences of possession of a false identity document contrary to section 25(5) of the Identity Cards Act 2006. She was sentenced by the learned judge to eight months' imprisonment for each of the offences, to be served concurrently, and was recommended for deportation. Her application for leave to appeal against sentence has been referred to the full court by the registrar, he having already granted an extension of time in which to make the application. The relevant extension was not of a very long period.
The application came before the court, differently constituted, on 13 October 2007, but had to be adjourned because of deficiency of paperwork. It comes before us again today. The adjournment was of course unfortunate given the short length of the sentence and the obvious attempts by the learned registrar to bring the case before the court as quickly as possible.
The facts can be shortly stated and were as follows. On 3 June 2008 police officers, accompanied by an immigration officer, attended premises at a road called Bampton Road in London SE23. They were not looking for this defendant, but she was in fact the only person present at the property. During the course of a search of the premises various documents were seized, including the three documents which are the subject of the present offences. Those three document were, firstly, a Nigerian Passport in the name of �Oluokun�; secondly, a provisional United Kingdom Driving Licence in the name of �Abdullah�; and thirdly, a false full UK Driving Licence in the name also of �Abdullah�. The first two documents were wholly genuine but not the applicant's property. The false full Driving Licence bore her photograph.
The applicant was arrested and gave a confusing account in interview as to the circumstances in which the documents had been created and came to be found as they were. She was originally charged with offences under section 25(1) of the 2006 Act, alleging that she had possession of the documents with intent to establish what the Act describes as �registerable facts� about herself. An application was pending to dismiss those charges on legal grounds, and that application was listed for hearing on 21 July 2008. On that date, however, as we have already indicated, the applicant pleaded guilty to simple possession without reasonable excuse of the two �genuine� documents, and to simple possession of the entirely false full Driving Licence.
The applicant is a Nigerian national. She is 47 years old and was of previous good character. She has been in the country since 1994. She claimed asylum, but her immigration status has, it appears, never been finally resolved. She is the mother of two children: a 17 year-old son still resident in Nigeria, and a 19 year-old daughter, who has recently come to this country. The father of both children died some time ago in Nigeria. There was evidence before the court as to a degree of ill-health suffered by the applicant. This showed that she suffered from diabetes and hypertension. There was no pre-sentence report.
On the present application, it is argued that the sentence of imprisonment was manifestly excessive, being more in line with sentences imposed in cases of possession of false documents with intent, whereas each of these cases was, as we have set out, simple possession. It is pointed out that two of the documents were in fact genuine, and there was no evidence to show that the documents had been used to the applicant's benefit in any particular way.
Finally, it is submitted in the written grounds that the judge failed to give adequate weight to the applicant's early guilty plea, her age, good character and poor health.
In the light of the passage of time, the applicant has now been released from custody. We have been told that she was in fact originally...
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