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	England and Wales Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Decisions
You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Decisions >> Looker, R v [2000] EWCA Crim 103 (3 October 2000) URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2000/103.html Cite as: [2000] EWCA Crim 103

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IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION

		Royal Courts of Justice The Strand London WC2
		Tuesday 3rd October 2000

1. MR JUSTICE RICHARDS: On 12th August 1996 at Luton Crown Court this appellant was convicted of one offence of attempted robbery and one of having an imitation firearm with intent to commit an indictable offence. She was sentenced by His Honour Judge Moss to a total term of 10 years' imprisonment, made up of 8 years for the attempted robbery and 2 years consecutive for having an imitation firearm.
2. There was a co-accused, Gary Benson, who was the appellant's boyfriend at the time. He pleaded guilty to an offence of attempted robbery and was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for that. He also pleaded guilty to having a firearm with intent to commit an indictable offence, for which he was sentenced to 3 years' imprisonment consecutive. There were, in addition, 12 month sentences in respect of two offences of burglary, concurrent with each other but consecutive to the other sentences. That made a total term of 14 years' imprisonment in his case.
3. The appellant's original application for leave to appeal against sentence was refused by the Single Judge and was not renewed at the time to the Full Court. The matter now comes before this Court as an appeal against sentence, as a result of a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
4. The circumstances of the offences were these. On 17th January 1996 the appellant and Benson attempted to rob a newsagent shop in Stevenage. She and Benson entered the shop at 5.30 am just as the relief manager, Mr Ainsworth, was opening up. Both the appellant and Benson wore balaclavas. Benson carried a loaded single barrelled sawn-off shotgun; the appellant carried an imitation pistol. They demanded money and the appellant tried, unsuccessfully, to open the till.
5. A struggle ensued between Mr Ainsworth and Benson, during which the shotgun was discharged but nobody was hurt. A passer-by saw what was happening and came to Mr Ainsworth's assistance. A general struggle then followed, during which both the appellant and Benson were restrained. The police were called and they were both arrested.
6. In interview, both the appellant and Benson made full admissions with regard to their involvement in the incident. Benson attempted to exculpate the appellant, telling the police that the robbery had not been her idea and that her role was limited to standing with him.
7. At her trial the appellant, upon advice, ran a defence of duress, claiming that she feared violence from Benson if she did not participate in the robbery. That defence was rejected by the jury.
8. In sentencing her the judge took account of her age (she was 22 at the time of the offence and is 27 now) and her lack of serious previous convictions. He accepted that Benson was the main mover in the robbery and without him the appellant would not have been there. But, he said, it was clear that she had taken an active role and a deterrent element was included in the sentence passed.
9. The appeal against sentence is based on the appellant's mental condition at the time of the offences. Some of the background facts emerged at the trial but no psychiatric report was prepared before sentence was passed and the full picture was not before the sentencing judge.
10. The reference to this Court by the Commission has been prompted by the contents of expert reports subsequently obtained on the appellant's behalf and now put before this Court.
11. The relevant facts concerning the appellant's mental condition are briefly these: she recounts a history of violence suffered, in part, at the hands of Benson but primarily at the hands of a previous partner by the name of Kelly Harris. She first met him when she was 19 years old. He was violent towards her throughout their relationship but the violence intensified when she tried to end it. On one occasion she was forced to sit in the middle of a room while Harris and his friends stood around and discussed methods of killing her. Later that night, she was taken out, stripped and forced to walk naked through local woods where she was eventually abandoned.
12. On another occasion Harris and his brother abducted her and took her by taxi to woods where she was raped by both of them. The incident was reported to the police, but she decided not to pursue the matter when the taxi-driver could not be traced.
13. The assaults culminated in June 1994, when she was dragged to a deserted playing field and tied to a tree and Harris attempted to have anal sex with her. He left her tied to the tree for a time before forcing her to run naked and urinating in her mouth when she did not move quickly enough. She eventually escaped and reported the incident to the police. Notwithstanding threats and intimidation from Harris' family, she pursued that allegation. Harris eventually pleaded guilty to robbery, false imprisonment and assault occasioning actual bodily harm, as a result of which the charges relating to the sexual offences were not proceeded with. However, the intimidation continued even after Harris had been sentenced, so that the appellant was induced to write a letter in support of his appeal.
14. The appellant said that Benson too had been violent towards her on two occasions. On one, she had suffered a broken rib. Benson suffered mood swings and was volatile and unpredictable, particularly after taking drugs. In the weeks leading up to the offence, in January 1996, the appellant had been suffering from depression and had attempted suicide. On the morning of 17th January, Benson was in a rage and had smashed up items in the house. She had walked with him to a nearby field where he had previously hidden the shotgun. Her state of mind at the time was such that she asked him to shoot them both, effectively in a suicide pact. He discharged the gun above her head but was unable to shoot at her. They then returned home for a short period after which he gave her the imitation pistol and took some drugs before driving to the newsagent shop. It was at the door of the shop that he told her to go inside and explained what she should do. She said that she knew that Benson would not hurt her but was likely to smash up the house if she did not co-operate. She felt she could not walk away because she had nowhere to go.
15. The experts' reports which examined that history and expressed the views of the experts upon it come, first, from a Dr Boast, a consultant in forensic psychiatry. In his report he expresses the opinion that the appellant was very significantly depressed prior to the offence. She exhibited many of the features which psychiatrists take to indicate more severe depression, particularly a low mood which is worse in the mornings and is associated with disturbance of sleep and appetite and weight loss. She also felt hopeless and helpless about the future and this had been associated with thoughts of self harm. In addition she had developed a relatively severe and enduring psychological reaction to mental and physical abuse from Harris. She had been left psychologically exposed in the event of further trauma.
16. Her relationship with Benson had exacerbated the problem. His consumption of drugs, together with his temper outbursts and threats of self harm, acted as factors helping to perpetuate her condition. Other factors included the continuing threats from Harris's family, and her view that the police could do nothing to help her in the light of her previous response to her complaints. Dr Boast regarded events immediately before the robbery as highly significant. The appellant became acutely suicidal and hopeless in respect of the future. The importance of that related to her lack of regard to the consequences of going through with the robbery and, in his view, her sense of hopelessness was associated with the helplessness. Her reported compliance with Benson's requests could, in psychological terms, be associated with the previous trauma and depressive thinking.
17. Her relative lack of disclosure about her history at the time of the conviction was to be explained on the basis that she coped by not thinking about previous abusive incidents and by suppressing emotion; putting forward a defence of duress based on the relationship with Benson was emotionally less difficult than full disclosure about her background with the unpleasant emotional effect that would bring.
18. The other report before the Court is by Dr Kelly, director of the Child and Woman Abuse Unit at the University of North London. She describes the appellant as having been, at the time of the offence, an extremely vulnerable young woman whose sense of being able to control her own life had been seriously undermined and who was profoundly depressed. She refers to the appellant's experience of unrelenting abuse and harassment as amounting to a culture of compulsion and says that the appellant's sense of powerless was accentuated by the failure of all the strategies she had tried to make herself safe.
19. On the basis of that material, Miss Shamash submits on behalf of the appellant that the sentencing judge would have taken a different view of the appellant's ability to withstand pressure from Benson and of the mitigation available to her had he known the full picture. The appellant's mental condition and ability to form reasoned judgments at the time was such that a sentence of 10 years in total would not have been passed and in any event is now to be seen as having been too long.
20. We accept that the expert evidence to which we have referred puts the appellant's case in a different light. The appalling experiences she had suffered had plainly had a serious psychological effect and went a long way to explain her compliance in participating with Benson in the offences. This was a substantial mitigating factor for which credit was not given in the sentence passed, because the full picture was not known.
21. In the light of those matters, we consider that a substantial reduction in the sentence is required. In our judgment, the appropriate course, in the circumstances of this case, is to reduce the sentence for the attempted robbery to 5 years' imprisonment, leaving the consecutive sentence of 2 years for possession of an imitation firearm. That makes a total term of 7 years' imprisonment, and has the consequence that the appellant will be entitled to immediate release on licence. To that extent, this appeal is allowed.