The crucial event was the change of plea to guilty. If a defendant submits that admitted facts do not in law amount to the offence charged and the trial judge rules otherwise, then it is not difficult to see how an appeal against conviction can lie after a plea of guilty. In those circumstances there remains no issue of fact for the jury to try. But where the admissibility of a confession is in issue and the trial judge rules that it should be admitted, as he did in this case, the truth of the contents of the confession, although having no relevance in the voir dire, remains a matter to be tried by the jury. A plea of guilty in those circumstances serves as an admission of the truth of the contents of the confession [in so far as they are necessary to establish guilt of the offence charged]. It is not a plea entered where there is no remaining issue to be tried by the jury because it remains open to the defence to invite the jury not to rely on the truth of the confession despite the fact that, contrary to submissions, the trial judge ruled that it was admissible. In appeals against conviction following a plea of guilty, the somewhat mechanical test of whether a change of plea to guilty was ‘founded upon’ a particular feature of the trial, namely a wrong direction of law or material irregularity, gives way to the more direct question whether, given the circumstances prompting the change of plea to guilty, the conviction is unsafe. . . a conviction would be unsafe where the effect of an incorrect ruling of law on admitted facts was to leave an accused with no legal escape from a verdict on those facts. But a conviction would not normally be unsafe where an accused is influenced to change his plea to guilty because he recognises that, as a result of a ruling to admit strong evidence against him, his case on the facts is hopeless. A change of plea to guilty in such circumstances would normally be regarded as an acknowledgement of the truth of the facts constituting the offence charged.
Judges:
Lord Justice Rose, Mr Justice Stuart White and Mr Justice Astill
Citations:
[1997] EWCA Crim 839, [1997] Crim LR 659
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Regina v Hewitson, Bramich, Vincent CACD 24-Sep-1998
The defendants appealed their conviction after admission of evidence taken from secret tape recordings taken from a recording device hidden in the garage of one of the defendants.
Held: The evidence had been properly admitted. It was not . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Practice
Updated: 06 July 2022; Ref: scu.150294