Criminal Justice Act 2003
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is a wide-ranging measure introduced to modernise many areas of the criminal justice system in England and Wales and, to a lesser extent, in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Large portions of the act were repealed and replaced by the Sentencing Act 2020.
It amends the law relating to police powers, bail, disclosure, allocation of criminal offences, prosecution appeals, autrefois acquit, hearsay, propensity evidence, bad character evidence, sentencing and release on licence. It permits offences to be tried by a judge sitting alone without a jury, in cases where there is a danger of jury-tampering. It also expands the circumstances in which defendants can be tried twice for the same offence, when "new and compelling evidence" is introduced.
Origins
The Act had its genesis in several reports and consultations:- Home Secretary David Blunkett, Lord Chancellor Irvine of Lairg and Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith's Justice for All - A White Paper on the Criminal Justice System, published 17 July 2002
- Lord Justice Auld's Review of the Criminal Courts of England and Wales, published on 5 September 2001
- Deputy Under Secretary of State John Halliday's Making Punishment Work: report of a review of the sentencing framework of England and Wales, published on 16 May 2000
- Mr Justice Carnwath's Law Commission report: Evidence of Bad Character of Criminal Proceedings, published on 9 October 2001
- Mrs Justice Arden's Law Commission report: Evidence in Criminal Proceedings: Hearsay and Related Topics, published on 19 June 1997
- Mr Justice Carnwath's Law Commission report: Double Jeopardy and Prosecution Appeals, published on 6 March 2001
The intention of the Act was to introduce reforms in two main areas: improved case management and a reduction in scope for abuse of the system.
Reforms to court and police procedure
Stop and search powers
Police "stop and search" powers are increased to include cases of suspected criminal damage in, for example, the carrying of spray paint by aspirant graffiti artists. People who accompany constables on a search of premises may now take an active part in the search, as long as they remain accompanied at all times. This is particularly useful in cases where computer or financial evidence may need to be sifted at the scene, for which outside expertise is required.Bail
The right of a prisoner to make an application to the High Court is abolished. Previously an application could be made to the Crown Court and the High Court as of right. The right to make a bail application by way of judicial review remains, although only if its more stringent tests applicable are satisfied. The Crown Court is now effectively the final arbiter of bail in criminal cases. Prosecution appeals against decisions of magistrates' courts to grant bail are extended to all imprisonable criminal offences.Conditional cautions
The police may now, as well as issuing the normal cautions, issue conditional cautions. The recipient of any kind of caution must admit his guilt of the offence for which the caution is imposed. Conditional cautions must be issued in accordance with a code of practice, issued by the Home Secretary. They will impose conditions upon the offender. If those conditions are breached the offender may then be prosecuted for the offence. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 extends the adult conditional caution scheme to young offenders.Disclosure
The Act makes amendments to the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 relating to prosecution and defence disclosure. The old system was that the prosecution would provide initial disclosure to the defence, the defence would provide a "defence statement" and the prosecution would provide "secondary disclosure" in response to that defence statement. Now the prosecution are under a continuous duty to disclose evidence, though the defence statement would impose a revised and stricter test. The test for disclosure — "evidence which undermines the prosecution case or assists the defence case" — remains, though the prosecutor's own opinion of whether unused evidence meets those criteria is replaced by an objective test. However, the defence still cannot force the prosecutor to disclose such evidence until a defence statement is produced, so this change means little in practice.Reforms are made to the extent to which the defence must disclose their case in order to trigger both the revised duty to disclose and the right to a "section 8" application to the court to force the prosecution to disclose an item of evidence. A defence statement must now state each point at which issue is taken with the prosecution and why, any particular defence or points of law upon which he or she would rely. The defendant must also give a list of defence witnesses, along with their names and addresses. The police may then interview those witnesses, according to a code of practice issued by the Home Secretary. The Explanatory Notes make it clear the police interviewing of potential defence witnesses is one of the intents of the Act. The details of any defence expert witness instructed must also be given to the prosecution, whether or not they are then used in the case. However, no part of the Act explicitly amends the law on legal privilege, so the contents of any correspondence or expert report would remain confidential to the same extent as before.
Co-defendants must now also disclose their defence statements to each other as well as to the prosecution. The duty to serve defence statements remains compulsory in the Crown Court and voluntary in magistrates' courts.
Allocation and sending of offences
The mode of trial provisions are amended to allow the court to be made aware of the defendant's previous convictions at the mode of trial stage. The right to commit to the Crown Court for sentence is abolished for cases when it has previously accepted jurisdiction. These provisions amend the previous position when a defendant whose bad prior record means that he is tried summarily and then sent elsewhere for sentence; the same type of court deals with both trial and sentence in ordinary cases. The provisions were introduced over section 41 and section 42 of Part 6 of the act.Prosecution appeals against case termination and evidence exclusion
The prosecution are given, for the first time, the right to appeal decisions by judges in the Crown Court which either terminate the case or exclude evidence. The prosecution has historically had the right to appeal decisions in the magistrates' courts on grounds of error of law or unreasonableness, and the right under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 to appeal an "unduly lenient sentence".A "terminating ruling" is one which stops the case, or in the prosecution's view, so damages the prosecution case that the effect would be the same. Adverse evidentiary rulings on prosecution evidence can be appealed for certain serious offences before the start of the defence case. These appeals are "interlocutory", in that they occur during the middle of the trial and stops the trial pending the outcome of the appeal. They differ in this respect from a defendant's appeal which can only be heard after conviction.
Jury service
The Act expanded substantially the number of people eligible for jury service, firstly by removing the various former grounds of ineligibility, and secondly by reducing the scope for people to avoid service when called up. Only members of the Armed Forces whose commanding officers certify that their absence would be prejudicial to the efficiency of the Service can be excused jury duty.This has been controversial, as people now eligible for jury service include judges, lawyers and police officers. Judge Bathurst-Norman commented: "I don't know how this legislation is going to work intelligently."
Trials without a jury
The Act introduced measures to permit trial without a jury in the specific cases of complex fraud and jury tampering, though these provisions did not come into force on the passage of the Act.Complex fraud
Section 43 of the Act sought to allow cases of serious or complex fraud to be tried without a jury if a judge was satisfied that:the complexity of the trial or the length of the trial is likely to make the trial so burdensome to the members of a jury hearing the trial that the interests of justice require that serious consideration should be given to the question of whether the trial should be conducted without a jury.However the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, subsequently sought to repeal the section and to replace it with new provisions under the Fraud Bill. In the event, that Bill was defeated and plans to introduce trials without a jury in serious fraud cases were dropped. Section 43 of the Act was repealed on 1 May 2012 by section 113 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.
Jury tampering
A case where a judge was satisfied that there was "evidence of a real and present danger that jury tampering would take place", and "notwithstanding any steps which might reasonably be taken to prevent jury tampering, the likelihood that it would take place would be so substantial as to make it necessary in the interests of justice for the trial to be conducted without a jury" may also be conducted without a jury. This provision came into force on 24 July 2007.On 18 June 2009, the Court of Appeal in England and Wales made a landmark ruling under the terms of the Act that resulted in the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, allowing the first-ever Crown Court trial to be held without a jury. The case in question involved four men accused of an armed robbery at Heathrow Airport in February 2004. It was the fourth time the case had been tried, but this time in front of only a single judge. The trial opened on 12 January 2010. The four accused were convicted, and on 31 March 2010 they received sentences ranging from 15 years to life. It was the first juryless criminal trial held in England for over 400 years.