England and Wales High Court (Administrative Court) Decisions

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
ADMIN

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
		01/02/2008

Mr Justice Silber :

1. On 22 October 2002, at the Crown Court in Liverpool, Stephanie Elizabeth Williams ("the defendant") was unanimously convicted of the murder of John Lamont ("the deceased") on 19 February 2002. She was sentenced to a term of life imprisonment.
2. As the trial Judge, I considered that the length of detention necessary to meet the requirements of retribution and general deterrence to be a period of 9 years. No recommendation was made by the Secretary of State for the Home Department.
3. I have been asked to set the minimum term pursuant to Paragraph 3 of Schedule 22 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 ("the 2003Act"). I have received written submissions on behalf of the defendant and from the parents of the deceased. The defendant has not requested an oral hearing and I do not consider one to be appropriate especially as I have received very careful and full submissions, which deal with all the relevant factors and I have some knowledge of this case as I was the trial judge.
4. The facts leading to the offence are that the defendant and the deceased had lived together from about July 1999 until the deceased's death on 19 February 2002, apart from a period of about 19 months when the deceased was serving a prison sentence for dealing in Class A drugs.
5. On 19 February 2002, the defendant and the deceased went out to dinner in a Huyton restaurant. After the orders for food had been placed, the deceased received a telephone call and in consequence he left the defendant alone in the restaurant for about 30 minutes while he drove off.
6. The evidence of other guests at the restaurant was that upon the deceased's return, the defendant said that she wanted to leave the restaurant while the deceased wanted her to eat her steak, which had just been served to her. The evidence of those guests with which the defendant agreed was that she tried to stand up to leave on three occasions but that on each occasion, the deceased pushed her down. It is common ground that the defendant and the deceased were having a row. The evidence at the trial suggested that the defendant was very angry.
7. The defendant said that the deceased had threatened to batter her. Significantly, none of the witnesses, who heard the conversation between the deceased and the defendant, said that the deceased threatened to batter the defendant.
8. The defendant said that she got up again and as the deceased tried to grab her, she accepted that she stabbed him on one occasion with a steak knife, although at the trial she could not recall picking up the knife. Nevertheless, the defendant described in her evidence how she held the knife in a dagger grip and moved it downwards with her right hand from about mid-face level towards chest level. One witness described the defendant as holding the knife with the blade pointing down "like the knife was held in the film Psycho".
9. Although the defendant denied it, witnesses said that the defendant called the deceased "a fucking cunt" as she stabbed him and one witness said that the defendant before the attack was "furious and on edge" and "seething". My clear impression as the trial judge was that the defendant was in an aggressive and furious mood at the time of the stabbing.
10. After she had stabbed the deceased, the defendant ran away from the table towards the bar. She thereupon dropped the knife with which she had stabbed the deceased by some glasses behind the bar, although at the trial she could not remember this.
11. The deceased staggered after the defendant but he collapsed and sadly died a few minutes later.
12. Dr Alison Armour, the pathologist who carried out a post mortem on the deceased, said in evidence that a downward and inward blow with a knife to the left side of the front of the deceased's chest had caused his death when the knife severed the costochondral cartilage of the second rib on the left hand side, before penetrating the right ventricle of his heart, thereby stopping the blood supply to the lungs. She considered that the knife was applied with the upper end of moderate force.
13. The defendant fled from the restaurant but she went to the police voluntarily after she had phoned the hospital to which the deceased had been taken and then discovered that he had died. On arrest, the defendant said that she was sorry and when she was then interviewed, she gave answers consistent with her evidence. She said first that she had been attacked on many occasions by the deceased during their relationship, second that she had been threatened by him with physical violence in the restaurant and third that she had stabbed him as an impulsive act.
14. At the trial the defendant claimed first that she had acted in self-defence in stabbing the deceased, second that she had not intended to cause serious bodily injury or to kill the deceased and third that in any event, she stabbed the deceased as a result of provocation by him. Each of these defences was put before the jury, who unanimously rejected them.
15. My conclusions on the aggravating and mitigating factors were that there was no provocation other than that the deceased had told the defendant unequivocally to eat her food.
16. This was a spontaneous attack carried out solely because the defendant was very angry as the deceased had left her in the middle of dinner and on his return, he had required her to eat her meal before they left. The stabbing was a spontaneous act. The defendant had impulsively and in the heat of the moment picked up the steak knife and stabbed the deceased intending only to cause grievous bodily harm to the deceased rather than kill him. Her contemporaneous comments support this conclusion and significantly, she stabbed the deceased in the collarbone area but the knife ultimately damaged his heart. She showed some remorse for the deceased's death.
17. She is 30 years ago of age and she had pleaded guilty to some relatively minor dishonesty offences in 1992 when she was about 20 years of age. She is the sole carer for her six-year-old son of whom Lamont was not the father. The evidence suggested that she was a caring mother for him.
18. I am required when considering the seriousness of the offence and the period to be fixed to have regard to the matters set out in schedule 21 of the 2003 Act. I am not permitted by statute to set a minimum term later than the term which the Secretary of State would probably have notified under the practice followed by him before December 2003. Therefore I have to consider what period would have been notified under that practice and then proceed to consider what period would have been arrived at by applying the approach set out in the 2003 Act and then impose the lower of the two periods.
19. In order to determine the term which the Secretary of State would probably have notified under the practice followed by him before December 2003, it is necessary to look to the letter sent by Lord Bingham CJ to judges on 10 February 1997 which governed the practice for murders committed between that time and 31 May 2002. The starting point for those murders was 14 years for the "average", "normal" and "unexceptional" murder and the defendant's murder falls into that category.
20. There were three mitigating factors as first the death of the deceased occurred as a result of a totally spontaneous and impulsive act and not a premeditated act, second the defendant has shown remorse and third she had not intended to kill the deceased but merely to cause him serious bodily harm and significantly I consider that the harm intended by the defendant was at the lowest end of that spectrum; this in my mind is an unusually powerful mitigating factor, which must lead to a realistic reduction in the period to be served. There were no aggravating factors.
21. The representations for the defendant make the point that whereas I had stated in my report to the Secretary of State that I rejected the assertion that the deceased had previously assaulted the defendant, there has been evidence adduced which shows first that the deceased had previously been violent and threatening to the defendant and second that this conduct rendered the defendant particularly vulnerable to respond to the deceased's conduct towards her in the restaurant by stabbing him. This new evidence, which was not adduced at the trial clearly calls for anxious reconsideration in respect of the issue of whether there had been provocation on the part of the deceased.
22. This evidence was before the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) when the defendant sought unsuccessfully to appeal her conviction last year. Auld LJ giving the judgment of the court concluded in relation to this evidence of the deceased's aggression to the defendant that:

"44.…in our comments in summarising that material, we have indicted that the reliability and cogency of much of it, if put in evidence, would clearly have been highly vulnerable, and in some important instances, potentially damaging to her case. In particular, it would have indicate her own propensity to aggression and violence, as well as [the deceased's], and also her own ability to hold her own to some extent against him on occasions" .

23. The Court of Appeal concluded that even with the new evidence, it would reject the defence of provocation but these matters could still constitute mitigating factors even if they did not amount to the statutory defence of provocation. As I have explained, there were loud conversation between the defendant and the deceased and none of those people who heard these conversations heard any threats from the deceased that he would batter the defendant. The defendant was not, in my opinion as the trial judge, a credible or an impressive witness and I conclude that no such threat was made. I also do not believe that the defendant had been subjected to any recent attacks from the deceased at the time of the stabbing because when the defendant was examined after her arrest, the doctor could not find any marks on her and there is no medical evidence of previous attacks on the defendant by the deceased.
24. I am prepared to assume that during their relationship the deceased had on occasions been aggressive to the defendant but, as the Court of Appeal found in the passage which I have quoted in paragraph 22 above, she was also aggressive and was able to some extent to hold her own. This will amount to a very weak mitigating factor as these aggressive episodes did not take place in the period before the defendant stabbed the deceased but may have occurred much earlier. In any event, I am quite sure that the defendant's act of stabbing the deceased did not have any influence or effect on the defendant's impulsive decision to stab the deceased which was the consequence of the defendant losing her temper because of a row she was having with the deceased. In other words, any acts of violence committed by the deceased on the defendant did not have any causative effect on her impulsive decision to stab him with the steak knife. In my view even in the light of these mitigating factors, the Secretary of State is likely to have fixed as the minimum period a term of 9 years. In reaching this conclusion I have considered other periods fixed for the minimum term and considered the matter afresh in the light of the matters now before me. As I have explained, I consider the mitigating factors to be very cogent in this case and so justify the reduction from the period of 14 years. I must repeat that I consider that the harm intended by the defendant was at the lowest end of the spectrum for intending to cause really serious bodily harm; this in my mind is an unusually powerful mitigating factor, which must lead to a realistic reduction in the period to be served.
25. The mitigating factors do not justify any reduction beyond the reasonable and very generous reduction of 5 years from the starting point of 14 years, which I made in my recommendation to the Secretary of State immediately after the trial. I should add that I have been provided with some material which shows that the defendant has made commendable progress in prison but it does not reach the threshold required to obtain a further reduction. The exceptional progress required to obtain a reduction under this head was considered by the Court of Appeal Criminal Division in Caines [2006] EWCA Crim 2915 when Sir Igor Judge P said that:

"52. From this statement, it is possible to discern some clear features. Good behaviour is not enough to constitute exceptional progress. We agree that the standard should be very high: the progress must be exceptional, outstanding, and bearing in mind that it provides the basis for a reduction in a period fixed for the purposes of punishment and deterrence, so it should be. Even where the necessary high standard is reached, the impact on the total tariff period is likely to be very modest. The longest reduction so far has not exceeded two years, and in the significant majority of cases where exceptional progress has been established, the reduction has been for one year. It also appears, and logically it is plain, that such progress falls to be considered when the minimum period is coming towards its end. Finally, it is a prerequisite to any reduction that the risk assessment should be favourable.

53.In future, when the court is considering whether exceptional progress has been made, it would be helpful for the information to include the observations from the governors (or the governor's representative) of the last two prisons in which the offender was serving his sentence. The information should not merely be directed to the governor's overall view of the progress of the individual offender, but should also provide assistance on how that progress should be assessed by comparison with other similar prisoners. Furthermore, the court should be provided with a satisfactory risk assessment. Evidence of remorse, if genuine, may tend to confirm that the level of risk posed by the prisoner has been reduced to negligible levels, but its absence is simply one factor to be taken into account in the risk assessment. At the same time those responsible for the assessment should bear in mind that an intelligent or manipulative life prisoner may appear to have made exceptional progress when, in reality, he represents a continuing danger."

26. The evidence adduced on behalf of the defendant does not contain the observations required on risk assessment or of exceptional progress needed to obtain a further reduction under this head. So I cannot and do not make a further reduction for it.
27. I now have to consider what period would have been imposed under the 2003 Act. The starting point would have been 15 years and the same mitigating factors apply as would have applied in relation to the period that the Secretary of State would have imposed under the regime in force at the time of the offence. Those factors would have reduced the term to 10 to 11 years.
28. This is longer than the period of 9 years which the Secretary of State would have notified under the regime in force at the time of the offence in order to meet the needs of retribution and deterrence. Thus as the defendant was on bail until she was sentenced, no time was spent by her in custody before she was sentenced to life imprisonment. I fix 9 years with effect from the date of the sentence on 22 October 2002 as the period to be served by the defendant before she can be considered for parole