Okedare, R v
2014
COURT OF APPEAL (CRIMINAL DIVISION)
United Kingdom
CORAM
- LORD JUSTICE ELIAS
- MR JUSTICE JEREMY BAKER
Areas of Law
- Criminal Law and Procedure
2014
COURT OF APPEAL (CRIMINAL DIVISION)
United Kingdom
CORAM
AI Generated Summary
Charles Okedare absconded before his trial for conspiracy to defraud and was convicted in absentia. He was handed a 5-year sentence and a confiscation order. The main legal issue was whether POCA allows a confiscation order for someone who absconds before conviction but is thereafter convicted in their absence. The court concluded that such an order is permissible under section 6 as applied by section 28 of POCA, thus quashing the existing confiscation order and remitting it for rehearing in the Crown court.
Judgment
Lady Justice Hallett DBE, Vice-President of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division :
This is the judgment of the Court.
General background
The Court has before it six applications for leave to appeal against conviction and or sentence from four separate trials. In each case an applicant has either deliberately absconded or disappeared. Notwithstanding the absence of a lay client, their lawyers wish to argue a variety of grounds. The first issue for the Court, therefore, is whether or not it is prepared to entertain applications for leave to appeal and appeals from people whose whereabouts are unknown; and if so in what circumstances. In recent years, there has been some confusion over the appropriate procedure to be adopted and a degree of inconsistency in practice.
The position was once straightforward. In Flower [1966] 50 Cr App R at page 34 Widgery J giving the judgment of the Court declared that the practice of the Court where an appellant escapes is either “to adjourn the appeal or dismiss it according to the justice of the case.”
In Jones No 1 (1971) 55 Cr. App. R. 321 the Court went further. It found (at pages 327-329) that a decision whether or not to appeal against conviction “cannot rationally be taken before the verdict is known”. It concluded that in all “save the most exceptional cases” the proper time for a defendant to take advice as to the prospects of an appeal and to give instructions to initiate appeal proceedings is after conviction and sentence. Where a defendant had absconded during a trial and “put it out of his power to give instructions at the proper time” the Court, as a general rule, would take the view that his solicitors did not have authority to initiate appeal proceedings and any notice of appeal was a nullity. This was so even if the defendant had given express instructions to appeal conviction (should it occur) post a failed submission of no case.
Accordingly, it became the general policy of the Registrar of Criminal Appeals to treat any application for leave to appeal lodged by the solicitors for an applicant who had absconded, on the basis that that the solicitors were “without proper instructions”.
Yet, in Gooch [1998] 2 Cr App R 130 , in what it described as an “exceptional case”, the Court found no difficulty in proceeding to hear an appeal where leave to appeal conviction and sentence had been given and the appellant absconded before the appeal against sentence could be determined. At the invitatio