Another blow to legislated sentencing

The non-mandatory nature of the sentencing guidelines has been emphasised in Spears v United States [2009] USSC 21 January 2009.

In using the Guidelines to calculate the sentence for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, based on the quantity of drug involved in the particular offending, the District Court had held that the Guidelines yielded an excessive sentence. There was no other particular reason, arising from the facts of the case, to depart from the guidelines. However there were decisions of other courts which used criticisms of the Guidelines advanced by the Sentencing Commission as grounds for departing from the Guidelines. Referring to those, the District Court here imposed a sentence lower than the guideline range.

The Supreme Court upheld the District Court's approach:

" ... we now clarify that district courts are entitled to reject and vary categorically from the crack-cocaine Guidelines based on a policy disagreement with those Guidelines. Here, the District Court's choice of replacement ratio was based upon two well-reasoned decisions by other courts, which themselves reflected the Sentencing Commission's expert judgment ... See Perry, 389 F. Supp. 2d, at 307–308; Smith, 359 F. Supp. 2d, at 781–782; Report to Congress 106–107, App. A, pp. 3–6."

This is an application of Kimbrough v. United States, 552 U. S. ___ (2007) in which the Court had held that "under Booker, the cocaine Guidelines, like all other Guidelines, are advisory only".

The guidelines have been amended (Nov 2007) after the District Court's decision in this case. Here are the current guidelines applicable to this offending. These strike one as being complicated. In any event, the judge would have to decide on a sentence independently of the guidelines in order to be able to say whether he should follow them. There is really no substitute for an assessment of the particular offending in its context and in the light of sentences passed in like cases. The likely financial gain obtained or expected from the offending can usually be assessed and is a means of comparing cases.

Roberts CJ, dissenting and joined by Alito J, would have placed form over substance and would thereby have created injustice for the appellant, the rationale – if one can call it that - being that this was not a suitable time to answer a "novel question".

Not a dies non blog

For a discussion of time limits for filing and serving extradition appeals in the UK, see Mucelli v Govt of Albania [2009] UKHL 2 (21 January 2009).

The phrase "dies non", used by Lord Neuberger at 84, prompts introspection. So much to do, so many dies nons. Indeed, part of the decision concerns the irritating habit (as I think of it) that the other side – whoever it may be - has of serving documents at the last possible moment.

Today is a virtual dies non in Auckland: next Monday is our anniversary holiday (celebrating the establishment of Auckland province) so today everyone is on "absent Friday".

This case illustrates the need for a uniform interpretation of extradition appeal time limits throughout the UK, so that from the various legislative contexts it emerges that filing includes serving, that the short time limits are for expeditious handling of cases and cannot – without express legislative permission – be extended by the courts, but at the same time they should not be read down. Filing by fax may be effected moments before midnight on the last day. Personal filing and service must be done before close of normal business hours where a business (or the court) is the recipient, but on dies nons (when the court office or the recipient's business office is closed all day) the time limit extends to the end of the next open day. [Update: for an example of the prosecution missing a deadline, see Attorney-General's Reference No 3 of 1999: Application by the British Broadcasting corporation to set aside or vary a Reporting Restriction Order [2009] UKHL 34 (17 June 2009), para 42 per Lord Brown.]

As you can see, today is not a dies non blog.

The limits of legality

Does a decision to release on parole a prisoner serving a determinate sentence have to be made judicially? Is the judicial nature of the original sentencing process sufficient to carry forward to make acceptable an executive decision to refuse parole?

Not every legal system permits the executive to have input on the parole decision. It is not the sort of decision into which there can be legitimate political input: Lord Rodger and Lord Carswell in R(Black) v Secretary of State for Justice [2009] UKHL 1 (21 January 2009), at 50 and 58.

In this case the Secretary refused to accept the advice of the Parole Board and declined – pursuant to s 35 Criminal Justice Act 1991[UK] - to order the release of Mr Black on parole. Lord Brown at 65 placed this provision in its historical context.

Having had his application for judicial review of the Secretary's decision declined, Mr Black appealed to the Court of Appeal, which held that s 35 was incompatible with art 5(4) of the ECHR which provides:

"Everyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful."

As Lord Brown recognised at 59, several recent decisions of the Court of Appeal held that such parole decisions should be made judicially.

Mr Black's plan, of course, is to obtain a ruling of incompatibility so that the UK legislature will be encouraged to reform the law by removing the Secretary's role in the decision process. Surprisingly, Mr Black will now have to seek that ruling from the Strasbourg court, because the Law Lords allowed the Secretary's appeal in this case.

They did so by a majority of 4 to 1, Lord Phillips dissenting and Lord Carswell hesitatingly agreeing (58) with the majority.

Lord Carswell thought it significant that ECtHR jurisprudence had not extended to the point in issue here, although dicta on analogous points (cases of indeterminate sentences from Belgium and Norway, and cases on recall of paroled prisoners from Lithuania and the UK) recognised the significance of the term of imprisonment having been set judicially at sentencing.

Lord Brown reasoned that the risk that an executive decision would be arbitrary was addressed by the availability of judicial review in domestic law. Determinate sentences do not engage art 5(4), whereas indeterminate sentences do, and if there is to be any fusion that is a matter for the ECtHR to decide (81, 83).

Lord Rodger agreed with Lord Brown. He found that the cases established that, for determinate sentences, the original sentencing process satisfied the prisoner's right to have the lawfulness of his detention decided by a court. Domestic review proceedings could be taken to check the lawfulness of the Secretary's refusal to order release. Even if that refusal was unlawful, the remedy was for the Secretary to reconsider the question and decide it lawfully (48).

Baroness Hale agreed with both Lord Rodger and Lord Brown, without giving separate reasons.

Lord Phillips, dissenting, declined to regard the lawfulness of the detention of a prisoner on a determinate sentence as having been determined at the sentencing, where there was subsequently an opportunity for release on parole (4). At that point the legality of the continued detention was a justiciable issue. He found there was "no great leap of reasoning" required to apply to determinate sentences the Strasbourg approach to indeterminate sentences (10), and his analysis of House of Lords dicta supported that conclusion.

It is difficult to see what useful role the Secretary could have in this decision structure. Given that his decision is subject to judicial review, it must be a reasonable decision. The criteria for release will usually focus on whether the offender poses any risk to the community or to the safety of any person. If the Secretary has any information on that he should pass it to the Parole Board. The Board is required to make reasonable decisions, although its function is not judicial.

There are other occasions where thinly-disguised political input is permitted on decisions on the release of potentially dangerous people. See, for example, Criminal Procedure (Mentally Impaired Persons) Act 2003[NZ], s 33(3).

Well, art 5(4) does not say that the lawfulness of detention can only be checked once. But on the other hand, there is a difference between the lawfulness of detention and the appropriateness of detention. If legislation provides that a prisoner shall be released on parole unless certain facts exist (a risk to society, etc), then it is arguable that the lawfulness of continued detention is amenable to judicial scrutiny. But if legislation provides that a prisoner may be released on parole if he satisfies the Board that no such facts exist, then it is arguable that his continued detention is lawful and there is no occasion to scrutinise its legality. In the present case, the legislation distinguished between a duty to release certain prisoners, and a power to release others. Mr Black was in the latter group. On this basis the majority decision may be correct. The anomaly remains: a long-term determinate sentence prisoner may come to be considered for parole after serving the same time as an indeterminate sentence prisoner. Why should they be in different positions concerning who decides on their release? And why should the prisoner who, years ago, merited an indeterminate sentence, be in a better position as far as access to a judicial determination is concerned?

Disclosure at common law: third party status of police

In R v McNeil [2009] SCC 3 (16 January 2009) the Supreme Court of Canada, in a unanimous judgment delivered by Charron J, addressed the disclosure obligations which apply at common law to the Crown and to the police. Of particular interest is the potentially difficult bridging of the information gap that may exist between the Crown and the police. Is the prosecutor obliged to make inquiries of the police for all information that could be relevant to the defence? Are the police obliged to volunteer such information to the prosecutor?

The Court refrained from laying down specific rules, but stated principles.

In this case (where the point was moot as the Court of Appeal had set aside the convictions and the Crown undertook not to re-prosecute Mr McNeil, but the Supreme Court appointed an amicus curiae to argue the issue) the arresting police officer – the Crown's main witness - had been subject to a police investigation concerning drug-related misconduct which had culminated in disciplinary proceedings and a plea of guilty to a criminal charge. At the time of Mr McNeil's trial the police had a file concerning the disciplinary proceedings against, and criminal investigation of, the arresting officer.

The Supreme Court held (53) that the police have a duty to disclose to the Crown prosecutor disciplinary procedure information where it is relevant and its discovery should not be left to happenstance. In deciding relevance the police may well be advised to seek the assistance of Crown counsel (59). The issue was not to be decided by reference to whether there was any reasonable expectation of privacy (11) [in this regard, contrast s 29(3)(c) Criminal Disclosure Act 2008[NZ] – not yet in force].

The police and Crown's duty of disclosure to the defence of fruits of the investigation was established in R v Stinchcombe [1991] 3 SCR 326.

There are some shortcomings in the above New Zealand legislation which become apparent when McNeil is considered. The Criminal Disclosure Act 2008 does not put an obligation on the Crown to seek information from the police (s 15), and it only requires relevant convictions known to the prosecutor to be disclosed (s 13(3)(d)). I have previously commented on the "wide rule/wide request/fairly wide enforceability" structure of this legislation: see blog on McDonald v HM Advocate [2008] UKPC 46, 21 October 2008.

The guidance set out in McNeil can be compared with the approach to claims of public interest immunity laid down in R v H [2004] UKHL 3, where the primary and essential requirement is trial fairness to the accused.

Reviving lost causes

Scalia J's dissent (joined by Roberts CJ and Souter and Thomas JJ) in Oregon v Ice [2009] USSC 14 January 2009 raises again the question of whether judges who have previously dissented should subsequently obey the law and not repeat their dissent in a later case on the same point. This question was considered here in relation to Young v United Kingdom (blogged 19 January 2007).

Oregon v Ice concerns the determination of facts necessary to support the imposition of consecutive sentences of imprisonment. The Supreme Court has recently established, by a majority, the rule that any such fact other than a previous conviction must be admitted by the defendant or found beyond reasonable doubt by a jury: Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U. S. 466 (2000), applied in United States v. Booker, 543 U. S. 220, 232 (2005). However in Ice the majority held that facts, outside those necessary for the determination of guilt on a particular charge, necessary for the imposition of consecutive sentences, are for the judge to determine.

As Scalia J pointed out, this is a distinction-without-a-difference; there is

"...no room for a formalistic distinction between facts bearing on the number of years of imprisonment that a defendant will serve for one count (subject to the rule of Apprendi) and facts bearing on how many years will be served in total (now not subject to Apprendi)."

He criticises the majority for relying on "the very same" arguments that the Court had rejected in previous cases. These included the difficulties that would arise from the multiplicity of issues that may need to be considered and the number of hearings that may be required. But,

"...That is another déjà vu and déjà rejeté; we have watched it parade past before, in several of our Apprendi-related opinions, and have not saluted. See Blakely, [Blakely v. Washington, 542 U. S. 296 (2004)] at 336–337 (BREYER, J., dissenting); Apprendi, ... at 557 (same)."

I have previously (26 July 2007) noted Lord Hoffmann's upholding of the majority view in a case in which he had dissented (Cartwright v Superintendent of HM Prison [2004] UKPC 10) when the same point came to be considered in Gibson v USA (The Bahamas) [2007] UKPC 52 – even though in so upholding the majority in Cartwright in Gibson he was in the minority again. Dissenting can certainly lead to problems. No doubt Scalia J has never adhered, and never will adhere, to his own dissents.

Now that Scalia J has failed to convince the majority of the Court that arguments previously rejected should not be revived, his own contention that that is the position must – by his own reasoning – itself be rejected. Otherwise – to pick just one example seemingly at random - an originalist approach to Constitutional interpretation would have to be rejected immediately after it failed to find majority acceptance. And – another example – review of Roe v Wade would not be possible.

Just over 20 years ago, after at least 15 years of agonising by generations of law students over whether impossibility is a defence to charges of attempt or conspiracy, the House of Lords rapidly reversed itself on this point: Anderton v Ryan [1985] AC 560, R v Shivpuri [1986] 2 All ER 334. Glanville Williams had roundly criticised Anderton v Ryan in "The Lords and Impossible Attempts, or Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" [1986] CLJ 33. It would be wrong to reject all possibility of rethinking weak decisions. But, subject to exceptional cases where reasoning has gone astray, or where policy can clearly be seen to have changed, judges of even the most senior courts should obey the law.

Should negligence be misconduct?

In Herring v United States [2009] USSC 14 January 2009 the majority (5-4) held that the basis for exclusion of evidence obtained in breach of the Fourth Amendment (the right not to be subjected to unreasonable search or seizure) is deterrence of official misconduct.

Prior to that decision reasons other than deterrence could have been advanced for exclusion of wrongfully obtained evidence. These were mentioned in the leading dissenting opinion of Ginsburg J: the need to constrain state power, to avoid taint to the judiciary from a perception of partnership in official lawlessness, to avoid undermining popular trust in government, to withhold constitutional approval of misconduct, to maintain respect for the law, and to provide the only practical remedy for official impropriety.

But no, held Roberts CJ, joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito JJ. If deterrence would not be effective there is no point in excluding evidence: the benefits of deterrence must outweigh the costs of excluding the evidence. These costs are the price paid by the justice system in allowing the particular offender to go free:

"To trigger the exclusionary rule, police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system. As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence."

In Herring the police mistakenly believed that there was in existence a warrant to arrest Mr Herring. That belief arose from a check on the database maintained by the local police. Before a copy of the warrant could be faxed to them, officers arrested and searched Mr Herring, finding drugs and a gun he was not entitled to possess. Within a few minutes the staff at the station realised that, as they could not locate the paper copy of the warrant their database must have been in error, so the arresting officers were informed. The evidence had already been discovered.

Was this a slight error arising from the system in place at the relevant station not being operated efficiently? The majority held that it was. There was no flagrant and deliberate disregard of Mr Herring's constitutional rights that would have been necessary to trigger the need for the deterrent response of exclusion of the evidence.

The minority strongly dissented on this point. Ginsburg J emphasised the need for computerised systems to be efficiently maintained in order to protect innocent people from this sort of conduct:

"Inaccuracies in expansive, interconnected collections of electronic information raise grave concerns for individual liberty. "The offense to the dignity of the citizen who is arrested, handcuffed, and searched on a public street simply because some bureaucrat has failed to maintain an accurate computer data base" is evocative of the use of general warrants that so outraged the authors of our Bill of Rights. Evans, 514 U. S., at 23 (STEVENS, J., dissenting)."

She disagreed with the majority argument that deterrence would not be effective against conduct that is merely negligent, pointing out that the law of torts is based on the assumption that liability for negligence will make people more careful.

There was no evidence that in this case the systemic errors were ingrained and frequent, and Roberts CJ regarded it as significant that they were not routine or widespread. If they were, deterrence would have been necessary on the basis that the misconduct had graduated from negligence to recklessness:

"If the police have been shown to be reckless in maintaining a warrant system, or to have knowingly made false entries to lay the groundwork for future false arrests, exclusion would certainly be justified under our cases should such misconduct cause a Fourth Amendment violation."

So, apparently widespread negligence would not call for deterrence unless it could be reclassified as recklessness.

In computerised databases errors can easily become widespread. False information about one person can become available to a large number of officials. There are good policy reasons for imposing on such a potentially error-prone system the safeguard of deterrence of negligent administration. Certainly it is appropriate to assess the circumstances of each case and to weigh the seriousness of the official misconduct against the public interest in admitting the wrongfully obtained evidence, but it seems to be wrong to impose a rule that negligent errors do not count as official misconduct.

Herring marks a significant departure from the Katz v United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) focus on privacy interests. Like anyone who did not have a warrant out for his arrest, Mr Herring had, one would have thought on the basis of Katz, a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to his person and his vehicle, at the time of his wrongful arrest. It was insufficient to justify the unauthorised interceptions in Katz that the Government’s agents acted in good faith and circumscribed their activities to the minimum they considered necessary, and the interceptions where held to amount to a bypassing of a neutral predetermination of the scope of the search which left the police to determine the scope of the Fourth Amendment protection. So too in Herring, the absence of a warrant to arrest him meant that the police, albeit innocently, determined – and terminated – his constitutional protection. Acting in good faith can hardly be a reason to admit wrongfully obtained evidence, because the police are expected always to act in good faith. Katz was not referred to in Herring. The breach of the privacy right in Herring was serious. That is not to say that the Court was wrong to rule the evidence admissible, because the balancing of this breach (measured as a breach of privacy) against the cost to the enforcement of the law might still have supported that result. The focus on the police misconduct was a very small part of the whole picture.

Haunted by the past

One way of getting a longer prison sentence than is warranted by a present offence is to have a bad record of previous criminality.

Sometimes statutory sentencing regimes spell this out. One approach is to exhaustively list the prior offences that will serve to increase a subsequent sentence, and to require courts to apply that list regardless of the particular facts that gave rise to earlier convictions. Another statutory approach is to state the quality of previous offending that will increase a subsequent sentence.

This latter approach came under scrutiny in Chambers v United States [2009] USSC 13 January 2009.

Here, the present offending received an increased sentence if the previous offending included a specified number of offences that were defined as violent felonies because they, inter alia (to mention only the critical point in this case) were

"... burglary, arson, or extortion, involve[d] the use of explosives, or otherwise involve[d] conduct that present[ed] a serious potential risk of physical injury to another"

(Armed Career Criminal Act 18 U.S.C. section 924(e)(2)(B)(ii); this is referred to as the residual clause).

The question was whether a previous conviction for failing to report for weekend imprisonment counted as a "violent felony". The lower courts had held that failure to report was a form of escape from a penal institution, and was therefore a violent felony because of the risk of harm posed by the aggressive behaviour of escape. The Supreme Court disagreed.

This required Breyer J (delivering the opinion of the Court in which Roberts CJ, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter and Ginsburg JJ joined), to distinguish the established approach of characterising previous offending by type of offence without reference to particular facts, from the process of determining whether a previous instance of offending fell within a specified type of offence. This latter required reference not just to the way offences were grouped in the statute that created them, but to the characteristics of the particular definitions within such a group. Here, failure to report was grouped in the relevant statute with escaping from custody. But failure to report was a form of inaction, not having the aggressive quality of escaping:

"The behavior that likely underlies a failure to report would seem less likely to involve a risk of physical harm than the less passive, more aggressive behavior underlying an escape from custody."

Furthermore, there was no significant evidence that a non-reported would pose a risk of violence:

"The offender's aversion to penal custody, even if special, is beside the point. The question is whether such an offender is significantly more likely than others to attack, or physically to resist, an apprehender, thereby producing a "serious potential risk of physical injury.""

Therefore the previous conviction did not count towards qualification for an increased sentence in this case.

Justice Alito, with Thomas J concurring, agreed in the result but called on Congress to create a specific list of defined crimes that are deemed worthy of attracting the sentencing enhancement.

"ACCA's residual clause is nearly impossible to apply consistently. Indeed, the "categorical approach" to predicate offenses has created numerous splits among the lower federal courts, ... the resolution of which could occupy this Court for years. What is worse is that each new application of the residual clause seems to lead us further and further away from the statutory text. Today's decision, for example, turns on little more than a statistical analysis of a research report prepared by the United States Sentencing Commission." [footnote omitted]

Plainly there is a need to avoid the sentencing courts having to make detailed inquiries into the significance of instances of prior offending, while at the same time providing a categorical approach that will deal appropriately with individual offences. In Chambers the present offence (being a felon in possession of a firearm) would have attracted a minimum sentence of 15 years' imprisonment if the prior offending qualified. That would – had the views of the lower courts prevailed – have given enormous significance to the offender's failure to report for weekend detention (he had failed to report for four weekends out of an eleven weekend sentence which had been imposed for a robbery and battery offence which itself qualified to be included in the present calculation). The Court does not say what sentence Mr Chambers received for the failure to report.

There are easier ways of sentencing recidivists. One is to leave it to the judges, but as politicians can gain votes by promoting harshness it is inevitable that legislators will intervene. Some jurists favour this. Such intervention could be by reference to previous sentences of imprisonment as criteria for increasing subsequent sentences. That approach avoids the difficulty of classifying offences.

Restoring pendency

Jimenez v Quarterman [2009] USSC 13 January 2009 is a narrow decision in which the plain meaning of statutory language is applied to determine when time for federal proceedings arising from a state conviction begins to run.

Sometimes the language used by a foreign court points to a concise way of expressing an idea. In this case the Court, in a unanimous opinion delivered by Thomas J, used the word "pendency". Here, a conviction had been entered and the time for appeal against it had expired. Later, the appellate court granted leave to appeal out of time. Had the conviction been final before the appellate court granted that leave? Yes. And after the appellate court granted leave to appeal out of time, was the conviction final? Clearly not, as an appeal was pending.

Normally we say that the appeal is pending, and that the conviction is subject to an appeal. Here the Court said the grant of leave to appeal restored the pendency of the conviction.

The Court interpreted section 2244(d)(1)(A) of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act 1996, which defines when a conviction is final, in a way that was consistent with the settled understanding in this context. Time for commencement of federal review proceedings begins to run when the state proceedings – including those where leave to appeal out of time has been granted - have concluded.

So, a common sense result. Enough to restore the pendency of one's disenchantment?

Getting on with it

Does either party, prosecution or defence, have an obligation to find the quickest way through the legal labyrinth?

The defence may complain of breach of the right to trial within a reasonable time, although in the course of the proceedings it took such legal objections as were available to it (eg objections based on lack of jurisdiction). Is the defence to blame for the time taken up in deciding such issues?

The defence might agree to a course that is not the quickest. For example, it may agree to have an issue of confiscation decided by the trial judge rather than the most immediately available judge. Or it may fail to seek severance from a co-defendant, when severance could have led to quicker resolution. Is the defence to blame for these sorts of delay?

If the state has done all it can to expedite proceedings, does that render all delay reasonable?

In Bullen and Soneji v United Kingdom [2009] ECHR 28 (8 January 2009) the Chamber applied (58) its established approach of assessing reasonableness of delay by reference to the complexity of the case, the conduct of the parties, and what was at stake for the defendant. These were confiscation proceedings, and were to be treated for this purpose as analogous to sentencing (applying Crowther v. United Kingdom, no. 53741/00, §§ 24 and 25, 1 February 2005).

Here the jurisdictional point had been particularly difficult, and the House of Lords had overruled the Court of Appeal. The Chamber summarises the House of Lords reasoning at 30. It was not a point that needed to be considered by the Chamber, but essentially it concerned the consequences of a statutory limitation on commencement of confiscation proceedings, and the distinction between mandatory and directory requirements, and between (for the latter) purely regulatory directory requirements (where breach never invalidates subsequent action) and other directory requirements (where the consequences of breach depend on whether there was substantial compliance with the requirement).

The Chamber held (62) that neither party was to blame for the appeal delay in this case.

The defendants could not be criticised for agreeing to have the trial judge determine the confiscation issue (64), and failure by the defendants to press for early determination or to seek severance did not absolve the state from its obligation to deal with cases within a reasonable time (65, citing Crowther, above). The defendants could not be blamed for the time it took judges to hear the confiscation argument and to reach decisions, or for the time between the lodging of the appeal to the Court of Appeal and delivery of that Court's decision (67, 68). The Chamber also noted (at 69, and seemingly in contradiction to para 62) the two year delay between the Court of Appeal's certification of the point of appeal and the House of Lord's judgment on that appeal. This latter may be an illustration of the kind of delay for which the state will not normally be responsible unless – as apparently here – the delay was inherently unreasonable.

The apparent contradiction between paras 62 and 69 disappears once it is remembered that it is not only the parties who are involved: the state is responsible for compliance with the defendant's right to a hearing within a reasonable time.

The Chamber noted that what was at stake for the defendants was serious (70): further imprisonment in default of payment of substantial sums, after the sentences of imprisonment had been served, and over 5 years since the convictions were entered, where payment was more difficult that it would have been without the delay.

The delay here was held to have been in breach of the art 6§1 right to a hearing within a reasonable time. An argument that the proceedings were unfair was dismissed.

Rational driving

Anyone using the roads these holidays will be pleased with the Supreme Court's decision in Aylwin v Police [2008] NZSC 113 (19 December 2008). Some people who will be caught driving with excess breath or blood alcohol levels will be displeased that unmeritorious and technical defences are disappearing, but the huge majority enter pleas of guilty at an early stage and accept responsibility.

There were two offences in Aylwin: failing to accompany an officer (s 59(1)(b) Land Transport Act 1998), and driving with excess breath alcohol (s 56(1)).

On the failing to accompany charge, a point of general interest was made. The defence had not challenged the witness's evidence that the breath screening test and the evidential breath test had been carried out properly so as to bring them within the statutory definitions of those tests. At the time of the defended hearing the Evidence Act 2006 was not in force, but the Supreme Court, upholding the Court of Appeal, held that unless challenged by the defence the witness's evidence that the tests were carried out is sufficient proof that they were. One would have expected the rule in Browne and Dunn to have applied, but in any event s 92 of the Evidence Act 2006 now requires cross-examination on "significant matters that are relevant and in issue".

It was open to the defence, on the failing to accompany charge, to cross-examine on whether the procedures that had occurred complied with the requirements of the definitions of the tests. The defence could, as always, advance any allegation of bad faith if the circumstances warranted that.

The excess alcohol charge was different in that errors in carrying out the breath tests are rendered irrelevant by s 64(4) and (5), so that the prosecution need only establish (para 14 of the Supreme Court judgment):

(a) The fact that a breath screening test was conducted;

(b) The fact that an evidential breath test was conducted;

(c) The results of these tests; and

(d) That [the defendant] was advised of his right to have a blood test.

As protection against errors in the breath testing procedure (whether human error or machine error), the person can elect to have a blood sample taken for analysis (para 11, referring to s 70A). The defence could still allege bad faith, but on the present facts there was no suggestion of bad faith.

There is no mention here of the right to legal advice that a person has during the testing procedures, which arises because of the element of detention necessarily inherent in the process. Breach of that right remains a matter relevant to the admissibility of the evidence of the result of the testing – whether of breath or blood - and this will be determined by the s 30 Evidence Act 2006 balancing exercise.

The judgment does not elaborate what challenges may be made to points (a) and (b) above, other than to mention bad faith. If the defence took issue with whether what was done amounted to, for example, an evidential breath test, then - given that errors in carrying out the test don't count - attention would focus on whether the device used was an approved device. A challenge based on bad faith would be directed at disputing the witness's honesty.