R v Mealey
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE |
| Judgment Date | 29 July 1974 |
| Neutral Citation | [1974] EWCA Crim J0729-4,[1974] EWCA Crim J0729-1,[1974] EWCA Crim J0729-3 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1974] EWCA Crim J0729-2 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Docket Number | No. 9/C/74 |
| Date | 29 July 1974 |
[1974] EWCA Crim J0729-1
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
The Lord Chief Justice of England (Lord Widgery)
Mr. Justice Park
and
Mr. Justice Forbes
No. 9/C/74
No. 57/C/74
MR. S. SOLLEY appeared on behalf of the Applicant Mealey.
MR. P. O'CONNOR appeared on behalf of the Applicant Sheridan.
MR. R.O.C. STABLE, Q.C., and MR. Q. EDWARDS appeared on behalf of the Crown.
On the 6th December last, after a 14-day trial at St. Albans Crown Court, the two present Applicants Mealey and Sheridan, together with one Campbell, were convicted on a number of counts in an indictment, but notably count 1 which alleged conspiracy to rob. In respect of count 1 they were sentenced to imprisonment for ten years in each case. The other counts gave rise to shorter concurrent terms and therefore do not require mention at this stage.
The first reaction of the present Applicants, and of Campbell for that matter, was to apply to this Court for leave to appeal against sentence. No application for leave to appeal against conviction was in the first instance forthcoming. Their application for leave to appeal against sentence was submitted to the single Judge, who refused it, and the Applicants then indicated that they wished to pursue their appeal against sentence in this Court, as they were of course entitled to do. The question of their conviction being in any way liable to be upset did not arise until the somewhat dramatic death of a man called Lennon.
Lennon was concerned with this case because the allegation of the Crown in regard to the conspiracy to rob was that it was a conspiracy by a number of persons living in Luton, who had concern for the Irish Republican interests and who had conspired to commit a robbery in order to provide funds for that interest. After the trial was over, and at a point when the application for leave to appeal against sentence was about to come to this Court, Lennon was shot dead in Surrey, having shortly before his death made a statement to an officer of the National Council for Civil Liberties, the gist of which was that he had been associating with Mealey, Campbell and Sheridan in Luton when they discussed the possibility of robberies and like offences being committed. Lennon had been a police informer, and in the course of his statement to the National Council for Civil Liberties he made certain criticisms of the police for having put pressure on him to act as an informer.
The application to appeal against conviction was on the basis that the death of Lennon had produced an entirely new slant on this case and that there might be questions as to the validity of these men's convictions arising from it.
The matter came before this Court first on the 10th June when a copy of Lennon's statement was put before the Court, but no other evidence was available to support the Applicants' case. The copy of Lennon's statement, as I so describe it, was not in fact signed by him because he did not live long enough to sign it. We now know that it was the result of an interview which he had with a Mr. Grant of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and that Mr. Grant had done his best to put Lennon's thoughts into writing in a form which resulted in the production of this statement.
When the matter was last before this Court there was no other evidence to support Lennon's association with the affair. Accordingly the Court granted an adjournment on the 10th June in order that the Applicants could submit further evidence if they thought fit to support their contention that the convictions were unsafe or unsatisfactory in some way by reason of the fact that Lennon was concerned in the affair.
We have looked at the two statements from Sheridan and Mealey compiled with that in view. I may say in passing that Campbell has abandoned his appeal and therefore we are no longer concerned with him.
Sheridan has put in a statement of substantial length. He refers to the fact that he belonged to the Sinn Fein from quite an early stage — February 1973. He reminds us that Sinn Fein is not in itself an organisation which is concerned with violence but merely with political matters, and he describes how, living in Luton and reading an Irish newspaper, he got to know Campbell and Mealey. Initially he, Campbell and Mealey were only concerned in quite a modest way with raising funds for Sinn Fein, running dances and matters of that kind, and he says that it was not until Lennon came upon the scene in April of 1973 that anything else was discussed.
His statement then goes on to describe how he saw Lennon six or eight times between the date in April 1973 to which I have referred as the first meeting and the date upon which these men were arrested, which was the 9th August, 1973. On the occasion of those six or eight meetings there was somewhat inconclusive discussion about the possibility of getting firearms and about the possibility of Sheridan, who was an ex-soldier, being able to assist in training, and that they should interest themselves in map-reading and the like; and he makes it clear that Lennon was a party to all these discussions and that he was certainly not taking a back seat when they were discussed.
However, nothing came of them in any criminal sense, or, indeed as Sheridan himself puts it, nothing very concrete emerged until later in the summer when the facts giving rise to their arrest occurred. Sheridan describes that by saying that until Tuesday, 7th August he had heard nothing of any projected robbery on the 9th, but he saw Campbell that night — and I pause to say that Campbell seems to have been much more closely associated with Lennon than either Sheridan or Mealey — and Campbell had alerted him that there might be something going on on the 9th August. He says how on the Wednesday he and Campbell went round to see Lennon, he understanding that Lennon would brief them about the proposed robbery, but Lennon was not at home and so they got no briefing on the Wednesday night.
The following day he went around to Lennon's house with Campbell at about 9. 30 or 10 o'clock expecting to pick Lennon up and get the final instructions for the job which was in prospect for that day, but Lennon said he could not leave his child who was sickly and therefore they would have to get on without him. According to Sheridan, he and Campbell and Mealey, in the absence of Lennon, went through the early motions of carrying out the robbery to which reference has been made. They had reached the stage of stealing a motor car, of having got some sawn-off shotguns previously in Lennon's possession available in the car and had reached the moment when they might have gone to the place of the intended crime to carry it out, but they were arrested by the Police with all the impedimenta of armed robbers about them.
Mealey gives a similar sort of factual account of his concern with Lennon, except that it is very much shorter, and Mealey seems to have seen Lennon less than Sheridan. Mealey was not intending to go on the job on the 9th August at all until Lennon refused to go, and then Mealey had to step in to take his place. But apart from that it is very difficult to see that any true factual link had been formed between Mealey and Lennon, except that they were both interested in Irish questions, they both lived in Luton, they both knew each other to some extent and frequented the same public house. How far Mealey knew about the offence contemplated on the 9th August is very hard to say, but it is quite obvious that he was not, on his evidence, intending to be a party to it at all.
With that factual background, the first thing which the Court has had to consider formally is the question whether that evidence should be admitted before us. We have applied our minds first of all, with counsel's assistance, to considering whether that evidence, if admitted, could have affected the outcome of the appeal. Since we have come to the conclusion that it could not, it is unnecessary for us to explore the other and substantial difficulties which might have lain in the way of the Applicants in seeking to upset the conviction.
The first thing which must be made clear in fairness to everybody is that there is no evidence, beyond such fragmentary parts of the statements of Mealey and Sheridan as I have indicated, that Lennon was an agent provocateur in the true sense. I say "in the true sense" because there is a neat definition contained in the report of the Royal Commission on Police Powers (Command 3297) in 1928 where an agent provocateur is taken to mean "a person who entices another to commit an express breach of the law which he would not otherwise have committed and then proceeds or informs against him in respect of such offence".
I say, in fairness to Lennon and indeed to the police, that it is not established to our satisfaction that Lennon came into that category, but that he was a police informer passing information to the police and co-operating with them is beyond doubt.
So far as the propriety of using methods of this kind is concerned, we think it right to say that in these days of terrorism the police must be entitled to use the effective weapon of infiltration. In other words, it must be accepted today, indeed if the opposite was ever considered, that this is a perfectly lawful police weapon in appropriate cases, and common sense indicates that if a police officer or anybody else infiltrates a suspect society, he has to show a certain amount of enthusiasm for what the society is doing if he is to maintain his cover for more than five minutes. Accordingly one...
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R v Sang (on Appeal from HM Court of Appeal (Criminal Division))
...Division of the Court of Appeal that "entrapment" is no defence in English law ( Reg. v. McEvilly & Lee [1974] Crim.L.R. 239; Reg. v. Mealey & Sheridan [1974] 60 Cr.App.R. 59), counsel for the appellant sought to achieve by a different means the same effect as if it were. He submitted tha......
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Maycock et Al v Commissioner of Police
...narrower point of view upon which this appeal actually turns. I can do so briefly. The decisions in Reg v. McEvilly, 60 Cr App R 150 and Reg v. Mealey, 60 Cr App R 59 that there is no defence of ‘entrapment’ known to English law are clearly right. Many crimes are committed by one person a......
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Calum Jones+john Doyle V. Her Majesty's Advocate
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R v Sang
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