R v Panayiotou
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE SCARMAN,Lord Justice Scarman,Mr. Justice Waller,and |
| Judgment Date | 14 May 1973 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1973] EWCA Crim J0514-5 |
| Docket Number | No. 2230/C/71 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Date | 14 May 1973 |
[1973] EWCA Crim J0514-5
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Lord Justice Scarman
Mr. Justice Waller
and
Mr. Justice Phillips
No. 2230/C/71
No. 2503/C/71
MR. E. THEODOTOU appeared on behalf of the Appellant Panayiotou.
MR. J. BOWYER appeared on behalf of the Appellant Antoniades.
MR. J.H. BUZZARD, Q.C. and MR. K.A. RICHARDSON appeared on behalf of the Crown.
The judgment I am about to read is the judgment of myself, Mr. Justice Waller and Mr. Justice Phillips. Each of us has approved the terms of the judgment I apologise to the Court and to the litigants that Mr. Justice Phillips is unavoidably detained from being here. Nevertheless he is, as I have indicated, a party to the judgment.
The two Appellants, Andreas Panayiotou and Agis Antoniades, on the 22nd April 1971 at the Central Criminal Court pleaded not guilty to a count charging them with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. After a trial which lasted eight days they were found guilty, Panayiotou being sentenced to three years' imprisonment and Antoniades being fined £1,000 with nine months' imprisonment in default. Both have been granted leave by the single Judge to appeal against conviction and sentence. This judgment is concerned only with their appeal against conviction.
The prosecution's case on the facts was short and simple. On 6th February 1970 a certain Mrs. Piasecka complained to the police that she had been raped by Panayiotou. The police tried to find Panayiotou but failed. On the afternoon of the 23rd February, Antoniades telephoned Mrs. Piasecka, gave a fictitious name, and, claiming to have met her some nine months earlier at a party at Brighton, invited her to dine. She accepted and they agreed to meet at the Tottenham Court Road Underground station at 7 p.m. Being suspicious, she told the police with the result that watch was kept on her rendezvous.
The police intervened almost as soon as they met. There then ensued a series of discussions between Antoniades and some police officers, which were the subject of fierce controversy at the trial. If the police were to be believed, Antoniades was in effect saying that he knew Panayiotou was wanted by the police, that Mario (that is Panayiotou) had told him he had had sex with a girl against her will and that he wanted to hear what the girl was saying to see if he could arrange things for Mario. He said that he hoped to reach some agreement with her about compensation so that she would not continue with the police and he had in mind that he could find her a flat very cheap. A police inspector gave evidence that when it was put to him that he had interfered with a witness in a serious case, he replied "I am sorry, but he wanted me to help him. You know what these girls are. I thought that she would be willing to accept an offer".
The case against Panayiotou was based on what he told the police when in August he was arrested in Eastbourne on a charge of attempted rape (not involving Mrs. Piasecka).
Both Appellants gave eivdence. They challenged the police evidence and gave their own account of the various interviews. They described a chance meeting on the 19th February. Panayiotou said he then asked Antoniades to give Mrs. Piasecka money that he had promised her for a flat, but denied that he had asked for help to get her to stop the case. Antoniades said Panayiotou had told him that a Polish girl had been making up stories about him and might have gone to the police or a solicitor out of revenge as he had failed to keep his promise to pay her money after he had made love to her. Antoniades said he agreed to help as he thought Panayiotou might have been framed. The defence case was that Antoniades' intervention was entirely innocent and that there was no intention to bribe the girl to alter her statement or drop the case, and witnesses in addition to the two Appellants were called in support of the defence case.
Thus on the facts there was a direct conflict of evidence as to the intentions of the two Appellants and as to what was said and done on the 23rd February between Antoniades and the police and in August between Panayiotou and the police. The Crown submitted that their purpose was to induce Mrs. Piasecka to withdraw the allegation of rape she had made to the police: the defence submitted that there was no such intention and that Antoniades intervened for the innocent purpose of helping a family friend to honour a promise he had made to a girl with whom he had had sexual intercourse.
Their grounds of appeal may be summarised as follows: (1) that the particulars of the conspiracy charged disclose no offence known to the law: (2) that there was no evidence of agreement or any intention to effect an unlawful purpose: (3) that the trial Judge failed to put adequately or at all their defence: (4) that the evidence of the police witnesses (the mainstay of the prosecution case) was so vitiated by contradictions, inconsistencies and changes of recollection that the verdict was unsafe and unsatisfactory.
(1) No known offence: If this contention is upheld, the conviction must be quashed. Counsel conceded - in our judgment correctly - that there is known to the law the offence of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. The offence was recognised as an indictable misdemeanour by the Criminal Procedure Act 1851 section 29, and has frequently been considered judicially: see for example R. v. Sharpe 1938 1 All England Reports 48, a decision of the Court of Criminal Appeal.
The Criminal Law Act 1967 has created certain statutory offences of acting to impede the apprehension or prosecution of an offender (section 4) and of concealing offences or giving false information (section 5): but, though it has abolished the crime of compounding an offence (other than treason), it is silent as to the common law offence of perverting or obstructing the course of justice. We do not read sections 4 and 5 as codifying the law in this field: it is not therefore to be inferred from this silence that the offence no longer exists. We share the view of the statute expressed by Mr. Justice Kilner Brown in R. v. Grimes, 1968 3 All England Reports 179.
The defence submission is not that there is no such offence, but that the particulars of the count do not sustain the charge of conspiracy. The particulars allege a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice "by seeking by bribery [and other unlawful means] to induce Alina Mary Stephanis Piasecka to withdraw an allegation of rape she had made" against the Appellant Panayiotou. The words "and other unlawful means" were deleted from the particulars in the course of the trial. It was accepted that in the context of the particulars "bribery" meant an offer of money or some other material benefit (such as the provision of a flat) as an inducement to withdraw the allegation of rape: and both sides have argued the point of law upon the basis that the prosecution's case is that the Appellants agreed together to offer money or other material benefit to Mrs. Piasecka to induce her to withdraw an allegation she had made to the police that the Appellant Panayiotou had raped her.
The Crown alleges that the offer was to be made to Mrs. Piasecka because she would be a critically important witness in criminal proceedings against Panayiotou: if she could be induced to withdraw her statement, the police would be without her vital evidence. The Crown concedes that when the agreement was made no proceedings charging rape had been begun but submits, on the authority of R. v. Sharpe supra, that the offence of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice can exist before proceedings are begun.
The defence contends that Mrs. Piasecka was not to be regarded as a witness but as a prosecutor, and that an agreement to offer an inducement to Mrs. Piasecka to withdraw her allegation could not be an offence unless it fell within section 4(1) or section 5(1) of the Act of 1967, and that the count charged no offence under either subsection. Thus the basic question in this appeal has been whether Mrs. Piasecka is to be regarded as a witness or a prosecutor. The Crown submits that her role was that of a witness and relies on the line of cases which has established the proposition that it is an offence at common law to attempt to dissuade or prevent a witness from giving evidence.
The fact that proceedings had not been commenced when the offence is alleged to have been committed does not, in our view, make it impossible to describe her at that time as a witness: see R. v. Sharpe supra; and compare R. v. Grimes 1968 3 All England Reports 179, where the fact relied on by the defence was not that proceedings had not been commenced but that the "witness" would not be needed as there was to be a plea of guilty, but the principle is the same.
In our judgment the question whether a person is to be treated as a witness or not can only be answered by having regard to the proceedings contemplated. If a person has made a statement with a view to the provision of evidence in support of criminal proceedings, certainly in that case such a person in relation to those...
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