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In the Media
General
| How MP’s complaint triggered investigation - February 4, 2012 »
The events that triggered yesterday’s announcement that Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce faced charges date back to March 2003, but were not set in train until an article in The Sunday Times last May. ... [view]
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| Letter: Reality of ritual abuse - February 2, 2012 »
The letter from the Committee for Ritual Abuse (23 January) appears to be conflate two types of claim, one presumably based on solid evidence, the other on extremely dubious evidence. There is little reason to doubt that within certain communities the use of exorcism rituals against children is on the rise, given recent tragic court cases. The letter goes on, however, to bemoan the fact that claims of ritual abuse involving white middle-class children and adults are not taken seriously. The latter are not taken seriously because there is no convincing forensic evidence to support them. Instead they are based upon dubious techniques for "recovering memories" – the same techniques used to "recover" memories of alien abductions and past lives. Furthermore, the former involve misguided beliefs of religious fundamentalists that a child is possessed, in contrast to the latter "recovered" memories, in which the alleged perpetrator is said to be a member of a Satanic cult. The two should not be confused. Professor Chris French Goldsmiths, University of London ... [view]
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| Trial by jury but you don’t trust jurors? - February 2, 2012 »
Juror Theodora Dallas was convicted of contempt of court last week for internet research into the previous court appearances of the defendant whose case she was trying and telling fellow jurors about her findings. The trial in which she was a jury member had to be restarted before a fresh jury. ... [view]
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| Is the legal profession looking at fission or fusion? - February 1, 2012 »
Last week I gave the President’s Oxford lecture at the Saïd Business School. It was a great privilege to be able to address a very distinguished audience on the long-term future of our profession. I felt compelled to ask what implications the freedom of barristers and solicitors to practise together in partnership, under the new regulatory regime, might have for the future development of these two great, separate pillars of the English and Welsh legal system. ... [view]
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| Morale low among Ministry of Justice staff - February 1, 2012 »
Evidence of poor morale among staff at the Ministry of Justice has emerged from the civil service’s annual ‘people survey’. Among its findings is that staff at the ministry and its agencies have no confidence in decisions made by senior managers. ... [view]
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| Weird Cases: Shot in the foot - January 31, 2012 »
On April 9, 2004, special agent Lee Paige of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was giving an educational presentation to about 50 parents and children at a community centre in Orlando, Florida. ... [view]
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| Expert witness plea - January 31, 2012 »
The Consortium of Expert Witnesses to the Family Courts has appealed to solicitors for feedback on the effect of fee cuts. The group believes there are already difficulties in obtaining access to qualified experts and has objected to lower rates of pay in London compared with the rest of the country. ... [view]
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| The great Asian gold theft crisis - January 31, 2012 »
With its value at a record high, gold has never been more attractive to thieves. Now burglars with metal detectors are targeting the homes of British Asian families for their collections of high-quality 'Indian gold' jewellery ... [view]
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| Ex-MI6 chief accused by Libyans - January 31, 2012 »
Sir Mark Allen, former director of counter-terrorism at MI6, was served with the papers at his London flat by representatives of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, Tripoli’s military commander, and another Libyan, Sami al-Saadi. Both men were imprisoned and tortured after being forcibly returned to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2004 with apparent British connivance. ... [view]
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| ACPO comment on crime mapping - one year on - January 30, 2012 »
The upgrade of the existing www.police.uk website announced today will provide the public with even greater access to important information about crimes occurring in their local area, including crimes at or near points of interest, such as shopping areas, airports, railway stations, parking areas and night clubs ... [view]
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| Fewer apply to study law - January 30, 2012 »
Applications to study law at UK universities and colleges have fallen sharply, figures released today show - but not as sharply as applications for university places overall. ... [view]
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| Is prison education working? - January 30, 2012 »
As privatisation forges ahead, Rachel Williams asks whether the pursuit of profit in prison education is failing inmates who most need to learn ... [view]
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| We’re clearing web backlog, says SRA - January 30, 2012 »
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has apologised for delays to online practising certificate renewal as it starts to clear the backlog of applications. ... [view]
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| A change would smack of cruelty - January 30, 2012 »
The law on smacking in is nothing if not confusing. For centuries hitting or beating a child was permissible under “reasonable chastisement”. ... [view]
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| ‘Give clearer guidelines about smacking’ - January 30, 2012 »
Boris Johnson has called on the Government to give parents explicit advice about when they can smack their children, after a Labour MP called for the laws to be relaxed. ... [view]
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| Fraud soars to record level as uncertainty mounts - January 30, 2012 »
For some, economic austerity is a time for tightening the purse strings and battling twice as hard for survival. But for many, it is an excuse to resort to fraud — and, increasingly, on a grand scale. ... [view]
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Legal Aid
General
| Legal Aid Bill domestic violence concession? - February 3, 2012 »
So far the government has made two concessions on the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill ('the Legal Aid Bill'), currently in the committee stage of the House of Lords. It seems more concessions might be on the way before the bill is approved. Speaking at the Westminster Legal Policy Forum yesterday, Justice Minister Jonathan Djanogly said the government was considering the amendments which had been suggested so far by peers. When questioned by LAG on whether the government was willing to reconsider the definition of domestic violence contained in the bill, he said that this was 'in the mix at the moment' and that while he believed that the current definition covered the same points as that of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), 'if there is a way of making people happy on this issue we will do it'. Campaign organisations including the Women’s Institute and LAG have argued that the ACPO definition should be included in the bill. ACPO defines domestic violence as, '... any incident of threatening behaviour, violence or abuse (psychological, physical, sexual, financial or emotional) between adults ... who are or have been intimate partners or family members, regardless of gender or sexuality'. The bill currently uses a different definition referring to physical or mental abuse which includes sexual abuse and: ' ... abuse in the form of violence, neglect, maltreatment and exploitation'. The ACPO definition is wider and some experts believe that the government might be forced to accept this definition by the courts if the current definition was approved without amendment. LAG believes the government might be taking the view that it should bow to the inevitable and amend it, especially as the Home Office is currently engaged in a consultation process on adopting a wider definition of domestic violence. The detailed criteria which have to be met in domestic violence cases to qualify for legal aid have not been included in the bill. This is of great significance in ensuring victims get the help they need. Details of this will follow in secondary legislation. In the debate on the bill, Baroness Butler-Sloss, a former senior family judge, asked for the criteria to be published before the report stage so that peers can scrutinise them. Jonathan Djanogly was more evasive when questioned by LAG on whether the government would concede over the amendment to reinstate legal aid for personal injury cases involving children, a move which is supported by Lord Tebbit and Lord Newton, the former Conservative Cabinet ministers. The minister said this is 'at the margins of what [the government is] looking at'. In response to a question from Cristina Sarb, a policy officer at the charity Scope, he said that the government was not considering bringing welfare benefits back into the scope of the legal aid system. Earlier in the meeting Roger Smith, director of Justice, had lambasted the government over its failure to recognise the danger of not having an independent appeals system over decisions on entitlement to legal aid: 'It’s a godsend to a litigator,' to be able to argue bias in the process for cases against the government, he warned. Roger Smith also observed that the government’s decision to cut legal aid was a political choice and if the cuts went ahead he predicted it would lead to 'the regeneration of the kind of movement we had in the 1970s,' which was originally responsible for widening access to civil justice. The government has given way on means-testing advice in police stations and included young people between the ages of 16-25 in the category of people able to claim legal aid for special educational needs cases. LAG believes that we need to keep the pressure on the government to win more concessions on the bill. Image: LAG: Jonathan Djanogly speaking at the event yesterday See the ">report report LAG commissioned from the Women's Institute and other news on the legal aid bill.
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| Law centres warn on legal aid cuts - February 2, 2012 »
Law centres will close, leaving ‘many thousands’ of the poor and marginalised without access to justice if the government’s legal aid cuts are implemented, peers have warned. ... [view]
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Practice & Procedure
Case law
| Human rights - February 1, 2012 »
Public order - Freedom of association and assembly - Defendant protestors setting up camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral ... [view]
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| Fraud - February 1, 2012 »
Money had and received - Defence - Claimants being victims of fraud by third party ... [view]
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| WAKOLO v DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS (2012) - February 1, 2012 »
An individual who was the freeholder of a matrimonial property, from which he had not been formally excluded and which was occupied by his estranged wife, was not a protected intending occupier under the Criminal Law Act 1977 s.12A, could not avail himself of a defence under s.6(1A) of the Act, and could be convicted of the use of violence to gain entry to a property whose front door he had damaged. ... [view]
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| Relevance of sexual infidelity of victim in defence to murder - January 29, 2012 »
Where, for the purposes of the partial defence to murder of loss of self-control, such loss of self-control was triggered by sexual infidelity that could not, on its own, qualify as a trigger for the purposes of the defence. However, where the defendant relied on an admissible trigger for which sexual infidelity was said to provide an appropriate context for evaluating whether the trigger relied on was a qualifying trigger for the purposes of the statutory provisions, the prohibition on sexual infidelity as a trigger did not operate to exclude it. ... [view]
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| COMMISSIONER OF POLICE OF THE METROPOLIS v N WEEKS (2011) - November 22, 2011 »
An employment judge had been correct to find that a civilian employee of the police was entitled to bring a claim against the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis in respect of acts, said to constitute sex discrimination, which had been carried out by her line manager, who was an officer of the City of London Police. ... [view]
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| R v EZRA TAYLOR (2011) - July 14, 2011 »
There was no legal inhibition against the imposition of a determinate sentence expressed to commence upon the expiry of a minimum term specified under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 s.269. ... [view]
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Procedure
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