R v Warner
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE EDMUND DAVIES |
| Judgment Date | 20 November 1970 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1970] EWCA Crim J1120-4 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Docket Number | No. 4524/B/70 |
| Date | 20 November 1970 |
[1970] EWCA Crim J1120-4
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Lord Justice Edmund Davies
Mr. Justice Milmo
Mr. Justice Shaw
No. 4524/B/70
MR. B. S. GREEN appeared as Counsel for the Appellant.
MR. J. TURNER appeared as Counsel for the Crown.
What should have been, as it was originally presented, a straightforward and simple little case of larceny has become one not without interest.
On 21st July last at the Essex Quarter Sessions the appellant was convicted of theft and he was discharged conditionally for 3 years. His appeal against that conviction is brought with the leave of the single Judge, who was disturbed by a certain direction given in law given by the learned Chairman to which reference must be made.
The one point involved in the appeal is whether the Crown established that the accused intended permanently to deprive the owner of certain goods which he unquestionably took. That was also the sole issue at the trial, and directing the jury in homely language the effect of Section 1(1) of the Theft Act, 1968, was all that was called for. But the matter became elaborated in such a way that we have come to the conclusion that there is no alternative but to allow this appeal.
A Mr. Thorne, a service engineer, got to his place of employment, a workshop at the rear of some premises in the High Street, Brentwood, at about 9 o'clock one morning. Finding that the workshop was still locked up, he went away to make a purchase, leaving his tools valued at about £17 in a blue box near the workshop door. He was back within a few minutes, coming down the passageway from the High Street running alongside Messrs. Warnes outfitters' shop next door. According to Mr. Thorne, as he came down that passageway he saw the appellant, who was an assistant in the outfitters' shop. He was approaching from the direction of the workshop door and going towards the back of Warnes' shop and was carrying a blue tool box which looked like Thorne's property. Mr. Thorne immediately looked to the place where he had left his tools and found that the box had gone.
The matter was reported to the police and within a short time, which was variously put at 9:45 and 10 o'clock a.m., a Police Constable went with Mr. Thorne to investigate. He saw the appellant, a 30-year-old men who had been employed throughout his working life as a shop assistant and who had a perfectly clean character, and asked him whether he knew anything about the missing tools. He made reply (and this was not challenged) "No, I don't know what you are talking about" The Constable then spoke to Mr. Thorne, who asserted that he had himself seen the appellant carrying his tool box. Thereupon the accused man said, "Well, all I can say is that he is mistaken." He was arrested an hour or so later and taken to the police station. He was there told that the police were going back to make a search and he then repeated that he did not take the tools and that Thorne was mistaken; indeed he furnished a written statement to that effect.
The police did not take long to find the tools. They were in a cardboard box under some scarves in a small room at the rear of Warnes' shop. When they shoved them to the appellant at the police station 8nd he was told where they had been recovered from, he said, "Yes, I took the tools and I panicked."
Those words are significant. They do to a degree adumbrate what he was going to say later at his trial and what (if true) he unquestionably ought to have said far earlier. He then made his written statement recounting the bare facts of seeing the tools and taking and hiding them, but still providing no explanation for his actions.
At his trial he for the first time gave some sort of an explanation. It emerged that there had been unpleasantness between the people employed in the workshop and those employed in Warnes' the outfitters. A dispute about a right-of-way was being handled by solicitors, and there was a suggestion that shortly before the alleged offence this appellant had been hemmed in when in his friend's car by a lorry outside the workshop which the men employed there had refused to move. The accused testified that he took the tools by way of getting his own back for having been thus inconvenienced by the workshop employees, that he had previously seen boxes of tools lying about in the yard, and that he would probably have kept Thorne's tool box for an hour and then return it to the place where he had found it. He said that he had initially put the box down by the door of the shop premises, but when the police arrived he had panicked; he had not expected the police to be called in and, being panic-stricken, he then put the tool box under the scarves, hoping that the police would go away and so enable him to return the tools without being detected.
There was a clear issue accordingly as to whether the accused had or did not have the necessary criminal intention of permanently depriving Mr. Thorne of his tools. It was the only issue which learned Counsel on both sides desired to have left to the jury.
But the learned Chairman unfortunately did not leave it in that clear way. Instead, there came a stage when he made reference to Section 6 of the Theft Act. Mr. Turner, appearing for the Crown, made it...
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