The defendant might have been chaged with an offence under section 6 of the Act, of unlawful intercourse with a girl under 16, but the prosecution would have been outside the time limit of twelve months. Instead he was prosecuted for an offence under section 14 of indecent assault, but based upon the same facts. He now appealed his conviction, saying it was an abuse of process.
Held: The prsoecution did not, here, amount to an affront to public conscience. Where the offence did not come to light until after the time limit had expired, and there was some additional aggravating factor, a prosecution for the lesser offence was not wrong, and settled practice was to limit the sentence to what would have been available to the court under section 14.
Judges:
Mr Justice Butterfield, Lord Justice Potter, His Honour Judge Paget QC
Citations:
Times 07-Feb-2003, [2002] EWCA Crim 2983, [2003] 1 WLR 1590
Links:
Statutes:
Cited by:
Cited – Brizzalari v Regina CACD 19-Feb-2004
Limits to Requests for Adverse Inferences
In closing, prosecuting counsel had suggested that during the trial two matters had been mentioned by the defence which had not been mentioned earlier, and that the jury should feel free to draw proper inferences under the 1984 Act from that . .
Appeal from – Regina v J HL 14-Oct-2004
The defendant was to have been accused of having unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 16. Proceedings could not be brought, because the allegation was more than a year old, and he was instead accused of indecent assault, but on the same . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Practice
Updated: 06 June 2022; Ref: scu.178540