Both defendants appealed against sentence saying that the court had not given proper allowance on sentencing for the time that had spent awaiting trial under curfew and electronically tagged.
Held: The appeals succeeded. Greater effort should be put into ensuring that the necessary information was properly provided for the sentencing court, and the court should apply the appropriate guidelines.
The Court reminded practitioners and judges of the action required to deal effectively with the requirements of the section 240A regime. In particular it was said that the Court would not routinely grant extensions of time to permit out of date applications for leave to be made.
Hughes LJ VP said: ‘This court should, we think, scrutinise with some particularity applications for long extensions of time when the sole complaint is an error of calculation relating either to section 240 or section 240A. We have it in mind that prisoners are usually provided with their earliest date of release, that is to say when they are eligible for release on licence, early and often very early in their sentence. Most prisoners, but not all, have a pretty good idea of when it ought to be. If a major error has been made they are likely to spot it. If the error is a matter of a very few days that might not be spotted but the consequences are much less serious. It ought not to be expected that this court will routinely grant long extensions of time to correct such errors when no one has applied his mind to the issue until long after the event. As always, if a defendant wishes to seek to appeal he must get his application lodged promptly. We sympathise with the position of counsel and solicitors but it will not be enough to obtain long extensions of time that counsel or solicitors accept that they also missed the point. We do not say that no extensions will be granted, but they should be scrutinised in future with care.’
Judges:
Lord Justice Hughes, Mr Justice Mackay and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones
Citations:
[2010] EWCA Crim 189, [2010] 2 Cr App R (S) 75, [2010] Crim LR 433
Links:
Statutes:
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Leacock and Others, Regina v CACD 12-Nov-2013
The defendants sought leave to appeal against their sentences, saying that the time served calculations had not included time spent subject to curfew and otherwise.
Held: ‘if a prisoner is serving a sentence for another offence at the time on . .
Cited – Thorsby and Others v Regina CACD 20-Jan-2015
These several applications raised a single ground of appeal namely that the sentencing court failed to give credit under section 240A of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, as amended, for one half of the time spent by the offender on qualifying curfew . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Sentencing
Updated: 14 August 2022; Ref: scu.401853
