Ronald John Bullock v Director of Public Prosecutions
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lady Justice Thirlwall,Lady Justice Thirlwall DBE |
| Judgment Date | 20 May 2022 |
| Neutral Citation | [2022] EWHC 1205 (Admin) |
| Docket Number | Case No: CO/4770/2019 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court) |
and
[2022] EWHC 1205 (Admin)
Lady Justice Thirlwall
Mrs Justice May
Case No: CO/4770/2019
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
DIVISIONAL COURT (ADMINISTRATIVE COURT)
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Philip Rule (instructed by Thomas Horton LLP Solicitors) for the Claimants
John Price QC (instructed by Director of Public Prosecutions) for the Defendants
Hearing dates: 15 March 2022
Approved Judgment
I direct that pursuant to CPR PD 39A para 6.1 no official shorthand note shall be taken of this Judgment and that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic.
This judgment was handed down remotely by circulation to the parties' representatives by email, release to the National Archives. The date and time for hand-down is deemed to be 10:30am on 20 May 2022.
This is the judgment of the court, to which we have both contributed.
Introduction
On 1 March 2015 police received an allegation of rape against RB. They arrested and interviewed him but quickly decided to take no further action. Nevertheless, at the age of 38 and just over a year after the allegation had been made against him, RB took his own life. The Claimants to this application for judicial review are his parents. They seek to challenge the Defendant (“DPP”)'s decision dated 12 September 2019 not to prosecute the Interested Party, being the woman who had made the original allegation of rape against RB.
Reporting restriction
The provisions of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992 apply. Nothing may be reported which could, during her lifetime, tend to identify the Interested Party as the alleged victim of a sexual offence. We refer to her in this judgment as DE.
Permission to bring these judicial review proceedings was granted by Supperstone J on 10 February 2020. Directions made on that occasion included joining DE as an Interested Party. Despite being joined, however, DE has never sought to make any contribution to proceedings. She was not present, or represented, at the hearing before us.
We are very grateful to both counsel – Philip Rule for the Claimants and John Price QC for the DPP – for their excellent written and oral submissions in this sensitive case.
Factual background
In February 2015, RB worked as a forklift driver at a company to which we shall refer as C. His shifts were from 1pm-9pm. DE was employed as a contract cleaner at two buildings on the same site where C was located, one of which was the office from which RB worked.
Sexual intercourse between RB and DE took place in one of the offices on site on Wednesday 25 February 2015. On Friday 27 February 2015 RB was informed by C that he had been suspended from work.
It subsequently appeared that DE had made a complaint of rape against RB to her employers on Friday 27 February 2015. On Sunday 1 March 2015 she made the same complaint to police. However, DE declined to make a written statement, to be medically examined or to be formally interviewed by police for an ABE (Achieving Best Evidence) video recording.
On Monday 2 March 2015 RB was arrested at his home by police on suspicion of rape, taken to Kidderminster Police Station and interviewed. Prior to interview RB, represented by the duty solicitor, was given advance disclosure of the matter about which he was to be interviewed. The written disclosure contained the following allegation:
“[DE] has alleged that…she and [RB] have gone upstairs at which point [RB] forced her onto [a] chair and started kissing her. She tried to push him away because she did [not want] to kiss him. He dragged her from the chair, bent her over a table, pulled her trousers down and had sex with her”
In interview RB gave a full account of consensual sex with DE. He said that he had asked DE if she wanted to go into the empty offices upstairs and have sex, to which she had assented. They had gone up together, kissed and had then had intercourse with her face down over a table. RB told police that DE had never given any indication that she did not want to have sex with him.
During the interview RB produced his phone to police, showing a series of WhatsApp messages exchanged between him and DE in the days and weeks leading up to their encounter on 25 February 2015, as well as messages sent by DE shortly afterwards on the same night and during the next two days. We have seen a full transcript of those messages.
The messages leading up to the encounter between RB and DE on 25 February 2015 are flirtatious and increasingly sexually explicit. Intercourse appears to have occurred at some point between 15.59 and 21.42 hours on Wednesday 25 February 2015, after which the messages continued. On Friday 27 February 2015 RB was suspended from work and by Saturday 28 February 2015 he was evidently unwilling to communicate with DE any further: he responded to a series of messages from DE on 28 February saying “Dnt talk 2me ur a shit stirrer” and then, in his final message to her “Dnt think so u got me the sack so stay away”.
After his interview RB was released on bail. It seems that his mental health difficulties, previously well-controlled, re-surfaced. At the end of May 2015, the police notified RB that no further action would be taken as there was insufficient evidence. He appears to have received a standard letter to the effect that the matter may be reviewed if any further evidence should come to light.
Despite learning that no further action was to be taken, RB's mental health continued to deteriorate and, in the early hours of 5 March 2016 he took his own life at his parents' home, where he was then living. His mother found him. Following an inquest, the coroner observed that he had no doubt that RB ultimately took his own life as a consequence of the rape allegation.
We understand how and why RB's parents and family, in their shock and grief at his death, should have sought answers and “accountability”, as it is put in their application. We do not lose sight of the terrible pain which any parent must experience at losing a child, at whatever age, and particularly under these circumstances.
West Mercia police interviewed DE under caution on 29 March 2018, with her solicitor present. In that interview DE continued to maintain that RB had had sex with her on 25 February 2015 without her consent; she gave an account of what she said had happened, and she was asked about some of the messages which she had sent to RB after they had had sex. She told police that, although she had been due to be married to her partner within 6 weeks of the incident of sex with RB, she “had every intentions of building a relationship” with RB and having an affair with him. However, on the evening in question, although she had been happy to engage in kissing with RB she told police that she had said to him that she did not want to have sex. DE informed police that two days later she had eventually told her partner about the sexual encounter, saying that it had been without her consent. She had also told her mother and was persuaded by them both that she needed to make a complaint to her employers and to police.
At the conclusion of the interview the officers told DE that the papers would be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service (“CPS”) and that she may be prosecuted for the offence of perverting the course of justice. The matter was sent to the CPS for a charging decision.
On 23 May 2019 RW James, Acting District Crown Prosecutor, informed the Claimants that the decision had been taken not to prosecute DE for any offence arising out of the allegation of rape which she had made to police in 2015. On 24 May 2019 the Claimants' solicitors wrote to the DPP asking whether the Victims Right to Review (“VRR”) scheme would be extended to them, to enable them to seek a review of the decision not to prosecute DE.
The Claimants were told that the VRR scheme would not be extended to them and on 12 August 2019, the Claimants' solicitors sent a Letter before Action preparatory to proceedings seeking judicial review of the CPS decision. On 13 August 2019 a Mr English responded, on behalf of the DPP, saying that the matter would be reviewed afresh by a Specialist Prosecutor at the CPS Appeals and Review Unit (“ARU”). There followed an exchange of correspondence under which the Claimants' solicitors sought disclosure of all the material which the Specialist Prosecutor, Mr David Hurlstone would have available to him when considering his decision. This was refused and accordingly, on 11 September 2019 the Claimants' solicitors submitted representations without having had sight of any material other than that which they had already managed to obtain through their own efforts.
The Decision under Challenge
The Specialist Prosecutor's decision is dated 12 September 2019 (“the Decision”). Mr Hurlstone confirmed that DE would not be prosecuted, upon the basis that the case against DE failed the evidential stage of the CPS' Code for Crown Prosecutors. He decided that there was not a “realistic prospect of conviction”.
The Decision went on to explain how and why Mr Hurlstone had arrived at this conclusion. He began by referring to the messages exchanged between DE and RB in the period leading up to 25 February 2015, describing them as “flirtatious…increasingly sexually explicit. It appears that a sexual encounter between the two was anticipated”. He noted that sexual intercourse took place although DE and RB's accounts of precisely what had happened differed, summarising this as follows:
“ The suspect asserts that she went upstairs with [RB], where he forcibly had vaginal sex with her before ejaculating on...
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