The court was asked about compliance with the time limits in the 1980 Act. There was a computer link between the police station and the magistrates’ court. The practice for laying an information was for the police to feed the information into the system which transmitted it to the court. The six month time limit expired on Saturday 6th June. The informations against the defendants were fed into the system by the police on Friday the 5th June. The input was not printed out at the magistrates’ court until Monday 8th June. The stipendiary magistrate held that the informations had been laid within time.
Held: Mann LJ said: ‘Mr Leighton Davies felt constrained – in my view, rightly so, – to accept that if the letter had been received on Friday but not opened until Monday, section 127 would have been satisfied. In 1988 and in the light of what Lord Roskill said in 1982, it appears to me quite unrealistic to suggest that there is any distinction between feeding information into a computer which is printed out on Monday and posting a letter which is opened on Monday. I regret that there is nothing that I can see in these applications despite all that Mr Leighton Davies has said on behalf of the applicants.’
Judges:
Mann LJ, Schiemann J
Citations:
(1988) 153 JP 213
Statutes:
Magistrates’ Court Act 1980 127(1)
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Rockall v Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Admn 22-Mar-2007
The defendant appealed against his conviction under the Act, saying that the proceedings had been issued late. The issue was the calculation of the date when proceedings were begun.
Held: There was no justification for reading the wording of . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Magistrates
Updated: 04 May 2022; Ref: scu.258452