Criminal Law Week

Is it unlawful for a passenger in a car to apply the handbrake while the car is moving?

Yes, said the Court of Appeal in R v Meeking (CLW/12/44/4).

The defendant, Caroline Meeking, and her husband, Alan Meeking, had been together for nine years. On August 30, 2010, they went out together in her Ford Escort from their home in Somerset to West Bay in Dorset. They both had plenty to drink. They were driving back, with her husband at wheel, at about 10.20pm along the A3088 at about 60mph. They had a row, and during that row, suddenly and without warning, the defendant pulled on the handbrake. She said later that it was done spontaneously to make her husband stop. The effect of her action was to lock the rear wheels and cause the car to spin across the road into a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle. Mr Meeking died of multiple injuries at the scene. The defendant was immediately mortified. Those who came on the scene described her as hysterical. She kept repeating that it was her fault. She said that they were having an argument, that he had said he did not want her and that she had pulled on the handbrake. She was charged with unlawful act of manslaughter and convicted. She appealed against conviction.

The prosecution had relied on her having committed the unlawful act of an offence contrary to section 22A(1)(b) of the Road Traffic Act 1988, which provides: “A person is guilty of an offence if he intentionally and without lawful authority or reasonable cause – …(b) interferes with a motor vehicle, trailer or cycle, …in such circumstances that it would be obvious to a reasonable person that to do so would be dangerous.” The defendant argued that that offence did not apply to her actions. However, the court held that there is no reason for reading a limitation into the offence such that it is confined to acts done to a vehicle before it is driven, nor does the conduct have to be in some way external to the vehicle itself. It said that pulling the handbrake on while another person is driving the car is, in the ordinary and natural sense of the words, an interference with the vehicle. It accordingly upheld the defendant’s conviction.

The court did go on to comment that if a case was essentially one of negligence, but arguably negligence falling short of gross negligence, it would be a possible ground for concern if it were prosecuted, by reliance on section 22A(1), as a form of unlawful act manslaughter. In this case, it was perhaps an unnecessary complication for the prosecution to have relied on unlawful act manslaughter rather than taking the “more natural approach” of presenting the case as one of gross negligence manslaughter. However, this did not affect the court’s ruling as it found it impossible to conclude that the jury could have come to any other verdict than guilty even if the case had been prosecuted as one of gross negligence manslaughter.

Is it for the court or the press to determine how to protect a complainant’s anonymity?

The press, said the Court of Appeal in Re Press Association (CLW/12/45/1).

On February 14, 2012, the defendant was found guilty of five counts of rape and four counts of breaching a restraining order. The trial had taken place in open court and the case had been listed under the defendant’s full name. Two days later, he was sentenced to imprisonment for public protection, with a minimum term of eight years and 273 days. On that date, counsel for the prosecution and counsel for the defendant appeared before the judge and drew to his attention the concerns which would arise if the defendant’s name were published, because of the risk that, by doing so, the media would inadvertently undermine the complainant’s anonymity. The judge made an order, initially under section 4(2) of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 and then under section 1(2) of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992, imposing a prohibition on the publication of the defendant’s name, specifically by prohibiting “anything relating to the name