R v Williams (Gladstone)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE |
| Judgment Date | 28 November 1983 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1983] EWCA Crim J1128-1 |
| Docket Number | No. 1833/B/83 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Date | 28 November 1983 |
[1983] EWCA Crim J1128-1
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
The Lord Chief Justice of England (Lord Lane)
Mr. Justice Skinner
and
Mr. Justice McCowan
No. 1833/B/83
MR. D. FENNELL, Q.C. and MR. J. PERRY appeared on behalf of the Appellant.
MR. W. HOWARD, Q.C. and MR. A. ISSARD-DAVIS appeared on behalf of the Crown.
On 9th March this year Gladstone Williams appeared in the Inner London Crown Court charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm. After a trial he was convicted and was given a conditional discharge for twelve months together with certain financial penalties.
He now appeals on a point of law against his conviction.
The facts were somewhat unusual and were as follows. On the day in question the alleged victim, a man called Mason, saw a black youth seizing the handbag belonging to a woman who was shopping. He caught up with the youth and held him, he said with a view to taking him to a nearby police station, but the youth broke free from his grip. Mason caught the youth again and knocked him to the ground, and he then twisted one of the youth's arm behind his hack in order to immobilise him and to enable him Mason so he said, once again to take the youth to a police station. The youth was struggling and calling for help at this time, and no one disputed that fact.
Upon the scene then came the appellant who had only seen the latter stages of this incident. According to Mason he told the appellant first of all that he was arresting the youth for mugging the lady and secondly, that he, Mason, was a police officer. That was not true. He was asked for his warrant card, which obviously was not forthcoming, and thereupon something of a struggle ensued between Masson on the one hand and the appellant and others on the other hand. In the course of these events Mason sustained injuries to his face, loosened teeth and bleeding gums.
The appellant put forward the following version of events. He said he was returning from work by bus, when he saw Mason dragging the youth along and striking him again and again. He was so concerned about the matter that he rapidly got off the bus and made his way to the scene and asked Mason what on earth he was doing. In short he said that he punched Mason because he thought if he did so he would save the youth from further beating and what be described as torture.
There was no doubt that none of these dramatis personae were known to each other beforehand.
That simple statement of affairs caused a great deal of difficulty for the unfortunate Recorder, with whom we have the utmost sympathy, because it raised issues of law which have been the subject of debate for more years than one likes to think about and the subject of more learned academic articles than one would care to read in an evening. Submissions were made to him as to the way in which he should direct the jury on the issue of possible mistake on the part of the appellant as to the circumstances in which he, the appellant, used violence upon Mason.
The contention of the Crown was that the prosecution need only prove to the satisfaction of the jury that the defendant was not acting under a mistaken view of the facts. Their contention was that they did not have to go further and (given that there was a mistake) show the mistake was an unreasonable one. The defendant on the other hand contended that the reasonableness or otherwise of the mistake was immaterial, and once the jury were satisfied that the appellant was labouring under a mistake and that on the mistaken facts as he believed them to be he would not have committed any offence, then the jury were not obliged to consider further the question of reasonableness.
The learned Recorder ruled that the prosecution's contentions as to the law were correct and rejected the submissions made by Mr. Perry on behalf of the defendant to the contrary.
Undoubtedly this question of the proper direction to the jury loomed very largely on the horizon so far as the Court was concerned, and understandably the Recorder had his attention directed primarily, if not exclusively, to the problem of whether the belief had to be reasonable in order to afford a defence, if one may put it in that way. Consequently certain fundamental matters to which the jury's attention should have been directed were unhappily overlooked. If one turns to the transcript, one finds first of all the Recorder giving the usual and perfectly correct direction to the jury as to the burden of proof being upon the prosecution.
He then at a later stage deals with the question of mistake and this is what he says: "If you come to the conclusion that the defendant, or if this applies to both of Mr. Williams and Mr. Theodore, had a belief - had the honest and genuine belief - and one could use all sorts of adjectives before the word 'belief' but I am not sure they add very much - had the true belief and the reasonable belief, that is to say, the belief based on reasonable grounds that Mason was acting unlawfully, then their use of force would be excused provided again that it was in all the circumstances reasonable and directed to preventing crime, namely the assault upon the youth, and directed to no more than that in the way that I have explained." That direction he repeats on the following page.
It is plain to this Court that those directions failed to make it clear to the jury that it is for the prosecution to eliminate the possibility that the appellant was acting under a genuine mistake of fact. The nearest that he ever got to such a direction is to be found at a stage where the jury returned to Court with a question to ask of the learned Recorder, and in the course of answering that question the learned Recorder says this: "If you think the position is, or the position may be, that the defendant Mr. Williams had such an honest and genuine belief based on reasonable grounds that Mason was acting unlawfully, then you go on to ask yourselves: was Mr. Williams' use of force to be excused because - again in all the circumstances - it was a reasonable use of force and directed to no more than preventing the commission of crime?" We take the view that the words "or the position may be" does not cure the earlier defect.
If authority is required for the necessity of a careful direction in circumstances such as these, it is to be found in the decision of Abraham (1973) 57 Cr. App.R. 799, and the passage, which there is no necessity for me to read, is to be found at page 803. More recently a similar indication is to be found in the judgment of Lord Justice Lawton in the case of Kimber (to which it will be necessary for the Court to refer at a later...
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