[Home] [Databases] [World Law] [Multidatabase Search] [Help] [Feedback] [DONATE]
	England and Wales Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Decisions
You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Decisions >> GMB, R. v [2025] EWCA Crim 414 (18 February 2025) URL: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2025/414.html Cite as: [2025] EWCA Crim 414

[New search] [Printable PDF version] [Help]

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
ON APPEAL FROM THE CROWN COURT AT WORCESTER
(HIS HONOUR JUDGE CARTWRIGHT) [22CA1017524]

		Royal Courts of Justice London WC2A 2LL
		18 February 2025

LORD JUSTICE DINGEMANS: I shall ask Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb to give the judgment of the court.

MRS JUSTICE CHEEMA-GRUBB:

1. This is an appeal against sentence brought with the leave of the single judge.
2. It is a case in which the provisions of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992 apply. Accordingly, no matter relating to those against whom sexual offences have been committed may during their lifetime be included in any publication if it is likely to lead members of the public to identify them as the victim of those offences. This judgment is anonymised to reflect that restriction.
3. The appellant is now aged 76, having been born on 30 July 1948. On 8 October 2024, in the Crown Court at Worcester, he pleaded guilty to nine counts of indecent assault, contrary to section 14(1) of the Sexual Offences Act 1956.
4. On 5 December 2024, he was sentenced by His Honour Judge Nicholas Cartwright to six and a half years' imprisonment, which was ordered to be served consecutively to a sentence of 34 months' imprisonment imposed for similar offending and for which he was then in prison. The appropriate ancillary orders were made.
5. The grounds of appeal are that the judge erred in failing to consider the effect of the earlier sentence and to have sufficient regard to the principle of totality which rendered the consecutive sentence to be manifestly excessive.
6. The facts in summary were that between 1971 and 1996 the appellant was a leader of a Scouts Association and ran Church Camps across Worcestershire. Members of his own family would attend the camps.
7. In May 2023 he was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, ten counts of sexual assault against his granddaughter. Shortly prior to the court case that led to that conviction and sentence, the police received reports from various family members alleging that they had also been the victims of sexual assault at the appellant's hands, either connected to the camps or in family situations. He was arrested. He provided a prepared statement at interview in which he said that he had only vague recollections of specific details due to the passage of time and his age, but he denied acting in a sexually inappropriate manner and denied the allegations. The nine charges concerned four victims who were all abused as prepubescent children and one of them again as an adult.
8. Girl A was a distant relative who went to one of the camps in Malvern in 1996. While left alone with her in a wooded area, the appellant put his arms over her shoulders from behind and pulled her towards him, holding her in place while his erect penis pressed against her back.
9. Girl B was a relative whom he sexually abused between the ages of 12 and 15 on multiple occasions. The appellant visited her home because of the Scouts Group Camp being located nearby. He would ask her for a hug and a kiss when her parents were not looking. Sometimes he would walk up behind her and put his arms around her chest and squeeze her breasts, or he would put his hand on her belly so that he could touch her breasts. He did this at least five times until she was 14. Separately, whilst she was at a family New Year's Eve party, when she was aged either 14 or 15, he pulled her into a bedroom and asked for a Christmas kiss. He put her hands over his erect penis and held them there. She froze before pulling away. Finally, when she was about 18 years old, the appellant gave her a lift home from a party and stopped at a Scout's club house. She went inside to find a tarpaulin laid on the floor. The appellant asked if she wanted to lie down with him, but she quickly left and walked the rest of the way home.
10. Girl C, also a family member, was 12 years old in 1993 when she attended the Church Camp run by the appellant in Malvern. Whilst a group was walking around the Malvern Hills he separated her from the rest of the group. He put his hand around her shoulder and into her bra, cupping and squeezing her breast, asking, "Is that nice?".
11. Another young relative, Child D, was 10 years old in 1980 when she visited the appellant's home. He would go into the room where she was sleeping at night. He started by tickling her back and then moved his hand around to her front to fondle her breasts. This happened approximately a dozen times on different occasions. In a separate incident at a family New Year's Eve party, he came up behind her while she was alone in the front room and pressed against her so that she could feel his erect penis in her back. He put his hand up her top, squeezed her breasts and asked if he was her favourite uncle for special hugs.
12. Subsequently, as an adult, she saw him again 20 years ago at a family wedding. He fondled her breasts over her clothing while they were walking home. She pushed him away.
13. In their personal statements the victims describe the shock and embarrassment they felt as young girls, but also the long-term impact the offending had upon them, which included difficulty in maintaining thriving relationships, feelings of shame and compulsion to self-harm, damage to self-confidence, lack of trust, depression, overprotectiveness of younger children, and feelings of guilt that they had not exposed the offending earlier. Such damage is typical from this type of abhorrent conduct which steals innocence from the young.
14. The appellant had sexually assaulted his granddaughter from 2017 to 2019, when she was aged between 9 and 11 years, on multiple occasions in a similar but more serious manner to the offending in this case. He caused her to touch his naked penis, touching her breasts, kissing her, putting his tongue into her mouth and touching her vagina under her clothing. He pleaded guilty to those offences at the first opportunity.
15. Prior to that conviction, in 1993 the appellant had been convicted of three offences of indecent assault committed on multiple occasions against three victims, also in similar circumstances, but predating the instant offences. A Probation Order had been imposed for 12 months.
16. Prosecution counsel provided a sentencing note. It referred, by way of comparison, to the sentencing guideline for similar offences under the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Counsel submitted that the correct approach would be for the judge to place himself in the position of the judge who sentenced in 2023 and to consider, in the round, what sentence would have been imposed for all of the offending at that time.
17. In his sentencing remarks the judge recognised that all the girls were in the appellant's care and that the offences were an abuse of that trust, apart from count 7 which was committed against one of them when she had become an adult. He had read the pre-sentence report relating to the 2023 convictions which were in respect of offences committed more recently than the offending for which he had to sentence. In essence, the instant offences occurred between those for which a Probation Order had been imposed in 1993 and those for which the sentence of 34 months' imprisonment had been imposed in 2023.
18. Apart from the abuse of trust, the offences after 1993 were aggravated by virtue of the fact that the appellant already had that conviction. He had been subject to probation intervention, and there were a number of victims involved over a period of time, including those to whom he would turn. The judge described the appellant as a "totally entrenched offender against young girls".
19. Mitigation was limited to the appellant's cancer diagnosis.
20. The judge observed that he had lived his life at liberty and in good health, until the age of 76, before punishment, while his victims were struggling with the psychological harm he had caused to them.
21. The judge had regard to the likely sentence at the time of the offending, given the more lenient regime in place then, as reflected by the Probation Order imposed in 1993. He expressly reduced the sentences for the individual counts, after reduction for the pleas of guilty at the plea and trial preparation hearing, for which 25 per cent discount was granted, to take account of the totality guideline. Finally, he imposed consecutive sentences for the offences committed against the four victims, which were ordered to run consecutively to the term that the appellant was serving. For Child A, on count 8, the sentence was 12 months' imprisonment; for Child B, the sentence was six months concurrent on count 1, but 15 months consecutive on count 2 (a multiple incident charge), and 15 months concurrent on count 3 (under clothing); for Child C, the sentence was 18 months consecutive for count 9 (under the girl's clothing); and for Child D, the sentence was 27 months concurrent on count 4, 30 months consecutive on count 5 (under clothing), 12 months concurrent on count 6, and three months concurrent on count 7 (committed when she was an adult). The total sentence was therefore one of six and a half years' imprisonment.
22. Mr Egan has made helpful written and oral submissions which can be encapsulated thus. Although no complaint is made about any of the individual sentences, when considered in the round the total sentence imposed in December 2024 is manifestly excessive because the judge failed to consider adequately the effect of the sentence passed in May 2023. A total sentence for the 2023 and December 2024 matters of nine years and four months' imprisonment is simply too long.
23. Mr Egan relies on the judgement of this court in R v Michael Green [2019] EWCA Crim 196, in which the court considered a sentence of 12 years' imprisonment, imposed after conviction on 17 counts of indecent assault arising from offending against seven victims. Shortly before his trial, Green had been released from prison after serving a nine year sentence for more serious offences committed at a time which overlapped with some of those for which he was subsequently tried. Having considered a number of previous decisions of the court in which a similar position had arisen, the court concluded that, had the 17 counts stood alone, the sentence of 12 years' imprisonment could not have been the subject of reasonable complaint. However, the sentence was found to be manifestly excessive when considered in the context of the previous sentence of nine years and the judge was wrong not to have had regard to that sentence. The sentence was reduced by two years. The rationale was expressed in this way:

"18. … Faced with a situation such as this, the judge sentencing in respect of the new offences, should consider all the circumstances in deciding what, if any, impact the previous sentence should have on the new sentence to be passed."

24. No definitive list could be laid down, of course, but those circumstances include:

• the fact that there had been a previous sentence for similar offences;

• how recently it had been imposed;

• how similar the offences were;

• whether the commission of the two sets of offences overlapped and to what extent;

• whether the offender could realistically have "cleared the slate" by bringing them to the attention of the authorities and asking for them to be taken into consideration;

• whether to take the previous sentence into account would on the facts of the case give the offender inappropriate credit, described by Tracey LJ in R v McLean [2017] EWCA Crim 170 as "an undeserved, uncovenanted bonus which would be contrary to the public interest", examples of which could be where a technical rule of sentencing has been avoided, or where the court has ben denied the opportunity to consider totality in terms of dangerousness;

• the age and health of the offender;

• any other relevant circumstances, including his conduct while in prison; and

• whether, if no account is taken of the previous sentence, the length of the two sentences is such that, had they been passed together to be served consecutively, that would have offended the totality principle.

25. The court said that if all these matters, and any others relevant, had been considered, the judge, having reached the appropriate sentence for the instant offences, taking into account the totality principle in respect of the new offences alone, he or she had a discretion whether to make some further allowance or reduction to take account of the previous sentence. Accordingly, the exercise to be carried out was not simply to consider what overall sentence the court would have imposed had it been seized of all the matters on the first occasion and simply deduct from that figure the sentence previously imposed.
26. In Green, the court recognised that when being sentenced for the original offences, the appellant could have asked the court to take into account the further offences he had committed and of which he has now been convicted. In failing to draw them to the attention of the police so that they could make appropriate enquiries and charge him, he put his victims through the ordeal of giving evidence, caused additional expense for the court system, and used up valuable resources. Thus, the court said that the appellant had deliberately run the risk of the situation in which he now found himself. Despite this, however, a total sentence of 21 years for all matters would have ben manifestly excessive. Hence the court made the limited adjustment to the sentence imposed.
27. The court also described the test to be applied on an appeal brought in such circumstances. Had the judge sentencing after the subsequent trial given these matters appropriate consideration and exercised a discretion not to take into account the previous sentence in all the circumstances, then in order for the Court of Appeal to interfere with the exercise of that discretion it would have had to have been shown that it had been exercised irrationally. This could be a difficult hurdle to cross.
28. Returning to the appeal before us, it is clear that, despite applying the relevant sentencing guideline, as moderated to take into account the more lenient sentencing regime in place at the time of the commission of the offences for which he had to sentence, and making the necessary reduction for the guilty pleas and allowance for totality within the nine counts, the judge did not specifically give consideration to the analysis needed in light of the overall position of the appellant regarding the sentence he was already serving, despite prosecution counsel alerting the court to the need to do so.
29. Accordingly, we conduct the necessary exercise. The previous sentence was imposed 18 months earlier. The offending was similar in that it was against a pre-teen child to whom the appellant had access because of family connections. But it was more serious offending against that single child. There was no overlap in time. The appellant could and should have admitted the offences before he was sentenced in 2023, as they had already come to the attention of the police and he had been interviewed about them. The appellant gained the advantage of being sentenced in 2023 with positive character references and on the basis that he was contrite. He expressed his shame and had not committed any offences for nearly 20 years before starting his offending against his granddaughter. He is 76 years of age and, while in custody, has been diagnosed with, and treated for, cancer. The total sentence, if imposed on the same occasion, would have been nine years and four months' imprisonment.
30. These were predatory, opportunistic offences against young girls who the appellant knew would not complain because of the family or Scout camp setting in which he exploited his contact with them. He persisted in them over a period of many years. It is clear that by the time he came to abuse his granddaughter his behaviour had escalated, despite his advancing age.
31. A total sentence of two years and ten months' imprisonment for the ten offences in her case was justified. We find no basis for criticism of any of the individual sentences imposed for the offences against the four victims on the latest indictment before the judge. We deprecate the appellant's stance in interview after the four victims had come forward. His denial of any memory of the serial offending meant that those women had to wait until he chose to admit responsibility before being able to get on with their lives, and it meant, as we have indicated, that he was able to benefit from an apparently long period of abstinence from offending when sentenced in 2023, which was entirely false.
32. Having conducted the analysis required in this case, and standing back from it, we are not persuaded that any further reduction is required to allow for the separation of the two sentencing exercises. In our judgment, a total sentence of nine years and four months' imprisonment, after guilty pleas, for all offences against the five separate victims, covering a span of time of 29 years, was not manifestly excessive.
33. Accordingly, this appeal against sentence must be dismissed.