R v Wood
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE |
| Judgment Date | 28 June 1982 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1982] EWCA Crim J0628-2 |
| Docket Number | No. 3219/B/81 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Date | 28 June 1982 |
[1982] EWCA Crim J0628-2
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
The Lord Chief Justice of England (Lord Lane)
Mr. Justice Michael Davies
and
Mr. Justice Hobhouse
No. 3219/B/81
MR. P.M. HARRISON appeared for the Crown.
On the 17th June 1981 at the Crown Court at Doncaster this appellant was convicted after a trial lasting 32 days of handling stolen metal and was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment suspended for two years and fined £5,000. He now appeals by leave against conviction. The only point taken is that certain evidence ought not to have been admitted.
The facts of the case were these. On the night of the 15th August 1979, a trailer loaded with drums containing a large quantity of metals processed by the London and Scandinavian Metallurgical Company Limited (L. S. M.) was stolen in transit. The metals were nickel cobalt shot, nickel boron and ferro boron. The total value of the missing metals was over £90,000. On the 7th May 1980, police armed with a search warrant, found at Minwood Metals in wellingborough a quantity of the same type of metals as those which had been stolen. Minwood Metals was a subsidiary company of the S. W. Wood Group (Metal Merchants) a company of which the appellant was a managing director based at Manor Road Works in the East End of London. It was the prosecution case that the metals seized at Minwood were part of the stolen load, that the appellant had taken control of the metals by ordering their removal from the Manor Road Works to Minwood for resale abroad knowing full well that they were stolen.
Thus the Crown in order to succeed had to prove ( inter alia) that this metal found at Minwood included metal which came from the consignment which had been stolen on the night of 15th August 1979. The way in which the Crown sought to do this was principally by proving that the chamical composition of the metal found at Minwood corresponded to the chemical composition of parts of the stolen consignment. For this purpose there was available in 1980:
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(a) Records of the chemical composition of the batches, or "melts" as they were called, of the original manufacture at L. S. M. as kept by L. S. M. These consisted of the arc furnace log sheets kept by Mrs. Shepherd and the stock book kept by Mr. Allard both of them employees of L. S. M.
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(b) Samples, the "retained samples", which had been taken from the melts of nickel cobalt at the time of their original manufacture by Mr. Tate another employee of L. S. M.
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(c) Samples, the "recovered samples", which had been taken from the metal found at Minwood.
These three categories of material were submitted to Dr. Ranson of L. S. M. who was assisted by a team of scientists. Dr. Ranson and his team then analysed the retained samples and the recovered samples and compared the results both with each other and the figures for various melts given in the arc furnace log sheet and the stock book. The process of analysis used by Dr. Ranson in 1980 did not differ materially from that used at the time of manufacture to derive the figures recorded in the above-mentioned documents. The material elements for which analyses were done were nickel, cobalt and copper and where relevant boron. For this purpose the samples were subjected to an X-ray spectrometer and, for boron, to a neutron transmission monitor. But these devices do not themselves give the percentages of the metals in the samples. The X-ray spectrometer for example merely measures the X-rays given off by the samples at various wavelengths and compares them with certain other criteria and measurements and produces ratios between the sample being analysed and a standard sample of zinc. The figures thus produced then have to be subjected to a laborious mathematical process before the actual percentages of the various metals in the relevant sample can be stated as figures. The same applies to the boron analysis. This mathematical process can be expressed as a formula and can be carried out by a chemist who is prepared to spend the time to draw out the appropriate curves and graphs. But the normal thing for a chemist to do now-a-days is to use a computer and this is what the L. S. M. chemists did. They had in their laboratory a computer which had been programmed by a Mr. Kellie to carry out this calculation. The computer was thus able more quickly and more accurately to carry out the calculation which otherwise would have been done by hand by the chemists.
The computer was worked by the chemists. They fed into the computer the figures which they had obtained from the X-ray spectrometer and the neutron transmission monitor; they then ran the programme which involved their giving further directions to the computer and at the end the computer produced the results of the calculation. The computer appears to have had a visual display but it also included a printer which conveniently prints out the answers. It was these answers which at the time of manufacture were supplied by the chemists to Mrs. Shepherd and Mr. Allard so that they could compile their records and, in 1980, were supplied by the chemists to Dr. Ranson for the purposes of making his comparisons on the retained and recovered samples.
At the trial there were called, besides Dr. Ranson, Mr. Kellie the programmer and all the chemists who had used the X-ray spectrometer, the neutron transmission monitor and the computer which the defence had required to have called. Between them they gave detailed evidence as to how the computer had been programmed and used. Before us Mr. Gale for the appellant conceded that he had no criticism to make of any of these people. The computer had been properly programmed using the right formulae and constants. The operators had used it correctly. He even conceded that the computer's answers were right. But he submitted to the trial judge and to this Court that the evidence of the computer results should be rejected as inadmissible at Common Law and not authorised by Statute. The trial judge rejected the submission and the evidence both documentary and oral was included in the evidence before the jury.
At this stage it is necessary to mention the Criminal Evidence Act 1965. Section 1(1) provided: "In any criminal proceedings where direct oral evidence of fact would be admissible, any statement contained in a document and tending to establish (a) that fact shall, on production of the document, be admissible as evidence of that fact if -(a) the document is, or forms part of, a record relating to any trade or business, and compiled in the course of that trade or business, from information supplied (whether directly or indirectly) by persons who have, or may reasonably be supposed to have, personal knowledge of the matters dealt with in the information they supply".
All the work and analyses that were done in 1980 were done otherwise than in the course of a trade or business; they were done for the purpose of the prosecution and in the course of its preparation. It follows that no documents produced in 1980 could qualify for admission under this section. They must qualify for admission at common Law or not at all. With regard to the documents relating to the time of manufacture, the original computer print-outs had not been retained and the chemists concerned no doubt had no actual recollection of the various percentages they had then obtained. The only records extant were those of Mrs. Shepherd and Mr. Allard. The figures in their records were supplied in the shape of computer printouts by the chemists doing the analyses at the time of manufacture and those chemists in turn had obtained these figures by using the computer.
Mr. Gale did not dispute that the chemists, at both stages, had actual knowledge of the fact that the computer had produced those answers to the calculations, so...
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