R v Keane
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE SCARMAN |
| Judgment Date | 23 March 1977 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1977] EWCA Crim J0323-6 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Docket Number | No. 1468/B/76 |
| Date | 23 March 1977 |
[1977] EWCA Crim J0323-6
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Lord Justice Scarman
Lord Justice Bridge
and
Mr. Justice Donaldson
No. 1468/B/76
MR. R. PRICE appeared on behalf of the Appellant.
MR. A. SUCKLING appeared on behalf of the Crown.
On the 10th February, 1977, we allowed the appeal of Peter Paul Keane against conviction. The issue was identification. The Recorder, when he summed up, did not have the advantage of the guidance since given by this Court in Regina v. Turnbull: and we were satisfied that in all the circumstances the verdict of guilty was unsafe. We now give in more detail the reasons for our decision.
It was at the Central Criminal Court on the 23rd February, 1976 that the Appellant was convicted, by a majority verdict, of causing grievous bodily harm with intent to do so and sentenced to three years' imprisonment. He was 19 years old, when convicted. He was tried together with another young man, who was convicted of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and sentenced to Borstal training. There had been an earlier trial, when the jury disagreed.
At about 11 p.m. on the 17th October, 1974, Leroy Noel, a young coloured man, was the victim of an unprovoked attack by a group of some five white youths. He was set upon in the street, knocked down, punched, kicked, and stabbed. His life was saved by the miracle of modern medicine. It was the prosecution case that Keane was the man with the knife.
As the Recorder commented at the very beginning of his summing-up, "essentially this is a case of identification." Leroy Noel was himself the only identifying witness. It is, therefore, a case which calls for examination in the light of the judgment in Turnbull.
In that case the Lord Chief Justice emphasised first the requirement that the Judge should warn the jury of the special need for caution, secondly the need for the Judge to direct the jury to examine closely the circumstances of the identification, and thirdly the need for him to remind the jury of any specific weaknesses in the identification evidence. If the quality of that evidence be poor, it is the duty of the Judge to withdraw the case from the jury and direct an acquittal, unless there is other evidence, which goes to support the correctness of the identification. Such supporting evidence does not have to be what lawyers call "corroboration", so long as its effect is to support the identification. Its weight is a matter for the jury.
It would be wrong to interpret or apply Turnbull inflexibly. It imposes no rigid pattern, establishes no catechism, which a Judge in his summing-up must answer if a verdict of guilty is to stand. But it does formulate a basic principle and sound practice. The principle is the special need for caution when the issue turns on evidence of visual identification: the practice has to be a careful summing-up, which not only contains a warning but also exposes to the jury the weaknesses and dangers of identification evidence both in general and in the circumstances of the particular case.
Unfortunately the summing-up in this case falls short of the requirements of sound practice. The warning is muffled and confused: the weaknesses in the evidence are not fully exposed: and some comments...
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