R v Keyes and Others
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 10 March 2000 |
| Date | 10 March 2000 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
COURT OF APPEAL
Before Lord Justice Pill, Mr Justice Crane and Sir Charles McCullough
Customs and excise - Commissioners need not institute proceedings
Where a person had been arrested under the customs and excise Acts for an offence, other than a summary offence, or for conspiracy to commit that offence, the court could deal with the case without the proceedings having to be instituted by order of the Customs and Excise Commissioners.
The Court of Appeal, Criminal Division, so stated when dismissing the appeals of Anthony Keyes, Thomas Ejedewe and Lorraine Chapman, against their convictions for conspiring together fraudulently to evade the prohibition imposed by section 3(1) of the Misuse of Drugs Act 197l on the importation of a controlled class A drug, in contravention of section 170(2)(b) of the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979.
Mr Zubair Ahmad for the appellants; Mr David Barnard for the Crown.
LORD JUSTICE PILL, giving the judgment of the court, said that although under section 145(6) of the 1979 Act the defendants could be arrested for the substantive offence for which they were charged without an order of the commissioners, Mr Ahmad had contended that section 4(3) of the Criminal Law Act 1977 prevented circumvention of the requirement to obtain that consent by charging instead a conspiracy to commit that offence.
He further contended that R v WhiteheadELR ([1982] QB 1272) did not apply and relied on R v PearceUNK ((1980) 72 Cr App R 295) where the Attorney-General's consent to a prosecution for incitement to racial hatred was held not to amount to authority to prosecute for conpiracy for the same offence.
In his Lordship's judgment, in deciding whether the prohibition in section 4(3) of the 1977...
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R v John Anthony Hardy and Another
...accepted by Mr Sutton before the learned judge that the cases of Whitehead (to which we have just referred) and another case, Keyes [2000] 2 Cr App R 181, were binding upon the Crown Court and against the submissions made for the defendants. The cases are indeed against the first point made......