England and Wales Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Decisions

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Cite as: [2010] 2 Cr App R (S) 91, [2010] 2 Cr App Rep (S) 91, [2010] EWCA Crim 381

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		Neutral Citation Number: [2010] EWCA Crim 381
		No: 200906215 A5

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION

Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London, WC2A 2LL

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

B e f o r e :

SIR ANTHONY MAY
(President of the Queen's Bench Division)
MR JUSTICE FOSKETT
MRS JUSTICE NICOLA DAVIES DBE
____________________

	R E G I N A
	v
	WILLIAM JAMES BLACK

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____________________

Mr G O'Connor appeared on behalf of the Appellant
____________________

HTML VERSION OF JUDGMENT
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SIR ANTHONY MAY: William Black is now aged 62 or thereabouts. On 9 December 2008, he was in the Crown Court at Maidstone when he pleaded guilty to arson, being reckless as to whether life was endangered. On 13 May 2009, after reports had been prepared, Judge Joy sentenced him to five years' imprisonment, with a direction under section 240 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 that 168 days on remand should count towards his sentence. He appeals against that sentence by leave of the single judge, who granted a fairly substantial extension of time, some 23 or 24 weeks, to enable him to do so.

The appellant had been married to his wife for some 24 years and their relationship was a bit volatile, and had deteriorated in the recent past quite significantly. Her view was that he had become an alcoholic, and that he had a long-term addiction to drugs. They started sleeping apart, and the appellant reacted badly to this.

On 23 November 2008, the police were called to the appellant's home. The appellant was drunk and had been throwing his wife's things about. His wife had gone to stay with friends nearby. During the following day, Mrs Black received a series of telephone calls from the appellant, and at about 3.30 in the afternoon, he left a message saying that he was going to set their house on fire and to go up with it himself. She, no doubt being alarmed by this, telephoned the emergency services. An ambulance arrived, and a paramedic found the appellant sitting in a chair in the conservatory. When asked whether he had set the fire, the appellant said he had, and when told that they should leave straight away, he said he was not going anywhere, and stayed in the chair in which he was sitting.

The paramedic checked the living room at the front of the property, and from the door he saw flames three to four feet high leaping from the sofa and the cushions on the sofa. The sofa was well alight. There was a fair amount of smoke sufficient to make the paramedic cough even though he was not in the room. He closed the door and returned to the conservatory. The appellant still refused to get up, and the paramedic and his colleague decided to drag him out of the house. The appellant was aggressive. He waved his arms and said he wanted to stay in the house, and at this time the living room was described as a mass of flames.

The Fire Brigade arrived whilst the appellant was being restrained on the ground. He said that there was a fire extinguisher in the house and that he wanted to go back inside to get it himself. The fire service helped to restrain him, and one of their number reckoned that he smelt of alcohol. The firemen found the living room alight, the sofa and cushions having caught fire. The property was a semi-detached house and the living room was next-door to a neighbour's property. The damage to the room was extensive and included damage to electrical wiring. The appellant was taken to hospital, but he discharged himself and was thoroughly unco-operative on that occasion.

He was later arrested, and when interviewed, he admitted that he had set fire to a cushion with a cigarette lighter. He blamed the fire crew for removing him and preventing him from putting out the fire himself with a fire extinguisher. He expressed surprise at the rate at which the cushion had burned. He denied any intention to harm anyone, and said that he started the fire in a moment of madness. He admitted that he had a serious alcohol problem, and that he had recently failed to attend for treatment.

In sentencing him, the judge gave him credit for his guilty plea, and took into account reports from a psychiatrist and a pre-sentence report which were before the court. The judge observed that the offence was committed whilst he was affected by drink, but he had been acting in an aggressive, manipulating and controlling way. He knew exactly what he was doing. He exercised a free choice and free will at the time. He had deliberately set fire to the cushion with the purpose of burning down the house, knowing full well that this was a living room next-door to a semi-detached house. But for the intervention of the Fire Brigade, the house would have been destroyed. Although the damage had been put at £3,000, he had been within moments of disaster.

The judge said that he was a selfish, controlling and manipulative person, who had lived a reckless life as a reckless person. He was ultimately a deeply anti-social person. Having regard to all the evidence, it would be unreasonable to consider him to present a significant risk to the public of serious harm occasioned by the commission of further such offences, and he noted that he was full of remorse according to the pre-sentence report. But that appeared mainly to concentrate on his own situation, and it was in these circumstances that the judge sentenced him to five years' imprisonment.

He had a record of ten previous occasions when he was convicted of 13 offences. The majority were for possessing drugs and shoplifting. None of them were for arson or for offences of violence. There was a psychiatric report before the court. A pre-sentence report indicated that he accepted responsibility for the offence, and expressed remorse. The offence, said the writer of the report, was part of an established pattern of behaviour, and an escalation in seriousness from previous offending. The opinion was that there was a high risk of re-offending, and that he posed a significant risk of committing further serious offences until appropriate intervention work had taken place, and that he presented a risk of harm to Mrs Black, his wife.

The grounds of appeal concentrate on one point. The submission made by Mr O'Connor is that the starting point, which must have been taken by the judge for an eventual sentence of five years, must have been in the order of seven and a half years, and that this was, it is submitted, manifestly excessive. Reference is made in particular to two Attorney General's References, and to a case called Singh, which we will come to in a moment.

The two Attorney General's references are No 23 of 2001 [2001] 2 Crim App R (S) 118, and No 98 of 2001 [2002] 2 App R (S) 25. In each of those cases, the court considered as unduly lenient sentences of three years, six months and three years community rehabilitation respectively, and increased the sentences for what Mr O'Connor submits were rather more serious factual circumstances than those in the present case. In the first of the References, the court indicated that a starting point sentence of between six and seven years would have been appropriate, and in the second of those cases, the appropriate starting point was at least six years. Mr O'Connor draws comfort from that to suggest that seven and a half years as a starting point was, on any view, too high.

The case of R v Singh [2009] 1 Cr App R (S) 52 is put before us as a parallel case with the present, in which, upon a plea of guilty, a sentence of four years' imprisonment was reduced to three years.

Mitigation is relied upon, including his age, his lack of relevant previous convictions, his regret and remorse, and his early plea of guilt. In particular, reference is made to the relatively low level of damage that was caused in the event that the Fire Brigade arrived in time to stop worse damage taking place.

We have given very careful considerations to these submissions. We are not persuaded in the circumstances that the sentence of five years' imprisonment for the matters which the judge took into consideration was manifestly excessive. In our judgment, the Attorney General's References justify a sentence at or around the level the judge arrived at, and although perhaps five years might be regarded as severe in the circumstances, we do not consider that it is manifestly excessive.

Accordingly, for these reasons, the appeal is dismissed.