Criminal and Civil Appeals Flashcards
Under what circumstances will a criminal trial be deemed unsafe according to the Criminal Appeal Act 1995?
Where a trial judge : Misdirects the jury; Fails to give the jury an important direction, such as a direction concerning the relevance of a defendant’s previous convictions; Admitted inadmissible evidence; Excluded admissible evidence.
Why did the judge in R v Cooper allow an appeal to the conviction?
‘the court must in the end ask itself a subjective question, whether we are content to let the matter stand as it is, or whether there is not some lurking doubt in our minds
How did R v Pope criticise R v Cooper?
court held that ‘‘it can…only be in the most exceptional circumstances that a conviction will be quashed on this ground [of lurking doubt] alone’.
How did Professor L.H. Leigh criticise the lurking doubt principle?
‘to set aside a verdict upon which a jury could properly arrive where there is no apparent flaw in the case strikes at the heart of the constitutional division of functions between judge and jury’
What did Roberts’ study reveal about criminal appeals?
the court had not adopted a more liberal approach to its powers granted by the ‘unsafety test’ and that fresh evidence appeals were less likely to be successful in 2016 than in 1990.
What did the study between 2006-10 find about how frequently the ‘lurking doubt’ argument was successful?
In rape and murder cases the ‘lurking doubt’ ground for appeal was raised over 30 time and was only successful on 3 occasions
What did the Supreme Court say about criminal appeals in R (Nunn) v Chief Constable of Suffolk Police?
there is a ‘powerful public interest in the finality of proceedings’ and hence they concluded that they would only reopen cases where there is real need to do so.
What % of applications to the CCRC are successful?
3%
What did the judge in Michael v The Queen say about the frequency of unsafe procedural impropriety in courts?
‘There will come a point when the departure from good practice is so gross, or so persistent, or so prejudicial, or so irremediable that an appellate court will have no choice but to condemn a trial as unfair and quash a conviction as unsafe, however strong the grounds for believing the defendant to be guilty.’
What caused unsafe procedural impropriety in R v Karakaya?
After the verdict was reached the court bailiffs found internet print outs of articles about the case and about Karakaya himself. The judges ruled that is was a serious misconduct and amounted to the conviction being unsafe and the defendant was acquitted to retrial.
Clearly this is a gross impropriety and any other decision would be a contravention of Karakaya’s Article 6 right under the ECHR.
