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The DPP announced revised CPS guidance on dangerous driving, with potential exemptions for members of the emergency services responding to legitimate emergencies, parents racing to hospital with a sick child and, in cases of death by dangerous driving, where the driver is “likely to have suffered significant personal loss from the bereavement”. This is the first example of the emotional grief of an offender being taken into account when deciding whether to charge them. The guidance states that the general presumption is still to prosecute where there is a fatality.
Three new High Court appointments were made. Amongst them was Robert Jay QC, who was previously leading counsel to the Leveson inquiry, and was frequently in the news for his florid use of language. From 4 June 2013 he will be referred to as “Jay J” and sit in the Queen’s Bench Division.
The Court of Appeal criticised the use of excessively long skeleton arguments in Standard Bank Plc v Via Mat International & Anor [2013] EWCA Civ 490. In the postscript to the judgment, the issue that the parties had produced 116 pages of skeleton arguments between them in what was essentially a relatively straightforward application was raised. After referring to the Civil Procedure Rules’ provisions on setting out Court of Appeal arguments “as concisely as practicable”, Lord Justice Moore-Bick said that skeletons are “not intended to serve as vehicles for extended advocacy”, and stated that the guidance in the CPR should be “rigorously observed”.
The plural of “Attorney General” is apparently “Attorneys General”, as discovered when the senior legal advisors of Canada, Australia, the United States, New Zealand and England and Wales met to discuss a joint strategy to combat sexual violence against women and children. They also affirmed that rape and other forms of serious sexual violence in international armed conflict are war crimes, and constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.
David Norris, one of two men currently imprisoned for the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, lost an application for permission to appeal his conviction. The Court of Appeal heard that Norris’s trial was “rendered unfair because only towards the end of the defence case did the full extent of the prosecution’s case on the critical issue of DNA transfer become clear”. Counsel for the applicant argued for a representation order to enable an expert to explore the possibility of “secondary transfer” of DNA, but this was declined.
