Off the Map: The death of Charles Bunyasi

The death of Charles Bunyasi began as a murder investigation but will now ‘drop off the map’. Why? Because it no longer counts as a homicide.

Mr Bunyasi was run over by his own van after it was stolen by a thief. The exact circumstances are unclear but detectives have charged the suspect only with ‘causing death by dangerous driving’.

This offence, brought in by the Road Traffic Act of 1988, was intended to prevent drivers escaping a charge of murder or manslaughter, mainly due to a lack of intent.

Under current Crown Prosecution Service guidance, a murder charge may be considered where ‘the vehicle was intentionally used as a weapon to kill’.

Where the killing was involuntary, the charge might be ‘unlawful act manslaughter’ or ‘gross negligence manslaughter.’

The first applies if the defendant uses their vehicle as a weapon or to frighten, whereas the second involves driving which ‘falls far below the minimum acceptable standard of driving’ and there is an obvious and serious risk of death.

Causing death by dangerous driving on the other hand requires only that the defendant’s driving is dangerous and a ‘more than negligible’ cause of death.

There is some debate whether drivers are being charged with causing death by dangerous driving when gross negligence manslaughter is more appropriate and carries a higher maximum penalty.

The CPS response to this, following a public consultation was:

Gross negligence manslaughter should not be charged unless there is something to set the case apart from one where one of the statutory offences [death by dangerous driving etc] can be proved. This will normally be evidence to show a very high risk of death, making the case one of the utmost gravity.

As a matter of law it is more difficult to prove an offence of gross negligence manslaughter than it is to prove an offence of causing death by dangerous driving. It is not necessary to have evidence of an obvious and serious risk of death to prove an offence of causing death by dangerous driving. All that is required is evidence that the driving was dangerous and that the driving caused the death of another person.

The maximum sentence for causing death by dangerous driving used to be ten years. It was increased to 14 years in 2003 and is perhaps now the preferred charge for prosecutors.

It also has the benefit of not being included in the homicide statistics kept by the Metropolitan Police.

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Case examples:

An example of a vehicle murder case is the death of Gary Johnson, who was deliberately mown down outside the Ministry of Sound nightclub.

Imran Raja was convicted of manslaughter after knocking down Robert Scott with his taxi in Mayfair.

Court vs Twitter

Why is Twitter seen as such a challenge to the justice system? It’s all about information, and who controls it.

Even in the digital age, the courts still wield enormous power. When a reporter walks into court he or she has to be aware of a series of restrictions.

You can’t give your opinion on a case, you can’t publish information the jury hasn’t heard and you definitely can’t film or record proceedings. If there are children involved, whether as defendants, victims or witnesses, they usually cannot be identified. You definitely can’t name the victims of sexual assault and you shouldn’t really identify blackmail victims. And if a judge has issued a contempt of court order banning reporting of the case, you may have to wait months or even years before you get a chance to publish your story.

Obviously members of the public aren’t aware of these restrictions. In the past this wasn’t a problem – they could tell their friends and family at home or down the pub, but they certainly couldn’t publish their words to the masses. That was left to the limited number of newspapers which could be easily monitored, and punished if necessary.

But with the internet, and especially Twitter (highly visible, highly fashionable), there are now millions of publishers out there. They can dash off a tweet in a few seconds without thinking of the consequences. How can they all be trusted to toe the line? Do you punish all the errant tweeters, or just the tweeters with the most followers? Or do you change Twitter by inserting a ridiculous delay mechanism?

Now that Twitter users have ‘made a mockery of the courts‘ by defying a series of superinjunctions, media commentators are rushing to ask their favourite question: ‘Where will it all end?‘ Will Twitter users wreck trials left, right and centre by spreading 140-character gossip in a global game of Chinese Whispers? Will it threaten the entire justice system?

A lot of people see this as a problem with Twitter. As a court reporter, I believe it is the justice system that is the problem and needs to adjust to the fact that it can no longer control information in the age of the internet.

Before Twitter it was Google that judges worried about. What if juries did a search on the defendant’s name and discovered all kinds of prejudicial information? What if they used it to investigate the crime themselves, or carried out their own research? What if they ignore everything we say and come to their own decisions?

Juries aren’t given much credit in court. They’re treated a bit like children asking questions about the facts of life. No, you don’t need to know about that. You just leave the court while the grown-ups discuss what to tell you. Because if you hear something we don’t want you to hear then you’re going to get up to all kinds of mischief. You can have minds of your own, as long as you follow this list of directions.

If you needed proof that this is wrong, here’s the view of a juror who happened to be a journalist. Because jurors are just like me and you, you see?

When I did jury service for the first time at the Old Bailey a few years ago–a case of aggravated burglary (ie, with violence)–I changed my mind about what one can expect of a jury. I had naively expected high standards of professional competence from the court, but thought the jury might struggle to do a good job. It was just the opposite. The prosecutor seemed to have been handed the brief as he entered the court. He was unacquainted with his own case. The defence dealt pointlessly (or suspiciously) with inessentials. The rules of evidence seemed mainly designed to deny the jury important information that, in its ignorance, it might misunderstand. The jury was engaged, gravely aware of its responsibility, and diligent in filtering out its own prejudices and considering only the facts.

What might a new system look like? Over in America you can comment on court cases. You can film in court. You can even get hold of and publish police charging documents. Juries are told to ignore prejudicial or bad information rather than shielded from it. Is this the reason for their higher crime rate? Has the justice system collapsed?

Here in the UK the Contempt of Court Act 1981, which is responsible for many of the restrictions on court reporting, was brought in to prevent the media undermining a fair trial. It’s meant to stop newspapers and their millionaire owners exerting undue influence, not to restrict access to information. As someone* somewhere once said, knowledge is power. No wonder Wikileaks is so popular.

If Twitter users are defying the rules, it doesn’t mean they are all anarchists and idiots out to distress rape victims and wreck trials. It means that they believe they are unreasonably being denied the facts. It means the rules might just be stupid. Let’s be glad it came to a head over a cheating footballer rather than government repression and state murder.

In the old days the public relied on newspapers to be their voice. Times change. The public are finding their own voice.

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* Sir Francis Bacon, in 1597, apparently.

Stenography and Charles Dickens

This week the BBC reported – in its own strange way – that court proceedings will be digitally recorded instead of taken down by dedicated stenographers.

This could be said to bring an end to a tradition going back to the 17th Century. It’s also quite a sad goodbye to a profession that has included an aspiring author known as Charles Dickens.

Dickens later referred to the job in his autobiographical novel David Copperfield, although not in altogether favourable terms:

I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence); and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep.

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Charles Dickens, at his desk in 1858. Photo by George Herbert Watkins. Source: Wikipedia

Dickens, like today’s stenographers, worked freelance – first at the civil courts known as the ‘Doctor’s Commons’ before stepping up to the Houses of Parliament, aged 19, in 1831. His reports were supplied to journals and newspapers including the True Sun and the Morning Chronicle.

Although there is no direct evidence he plied his trade at the Old Bailey, there is a transcript from a murder trial in the Dexter collection of Dickens papers at the British Library. It reports on the case of three men accused of carrying out two killings so they could sell the body to anatomy lecturers.*

Dickens did however write a sketch about his visit to Newgate Prison and based at least one character on a famous murderess [Mademoiselle Hortense in Bleak House].

But the history of ‘court reporting’ at the Old Bailey isn’t a simple one. The first comprehensive ‘Proceedings of the Old Bailey’ (rather than individual reports of famous cases) was published commercially in the late 17th Century. By 1787, as the newspapers began printing their own reports, they were being subsidised by the City of London. By 1834, when the Bailey became the Central Criminal Court, they were pretty-much publicly funded.**

Anyone can now read these reports online, for free. That is until 1913 when they stopped, undercut by the official appointment of shorthand writers by the state following the Criminal Appeal Act of 1907. For records after that date you have to search through files at the National Archives, although no doubt a lot of material has just been chucked out.

In recent years the official task of taking a full note of proceedings has been farmed out to a private company, Merill Legal Solutions. I’m not sure what happens to their records, although I’ve heard they get destroyed after six years. As for getting hold of a copy of a transcript, only law firms and the government can afford the fees.

All of which means that once the government decided not to continue the contract past March 2012, the stenographers effectively lost their jobs. Some may leave the profession altogether.

Their role is now taken over by the clerk of the court, who will have to press the right button at the right moment to ensure the case is being recorded. What will happen to those recordings? Will they be transcribed and published online (like they do in some American courts)?

Somehow, I doubt it. Stenography will now only live on in the shorthand of the motley assortment of hacks who dart from court to court looking for a story. Although some say this is also a dying art.

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*Another report of the trial of Bishop, Williams and May can also be found on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey website.

**The publishing history of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey can be found here

Open Justice and Court Reporting: Dull or Drama?

At its best the courtroom provides compelling drama of the kind rarely seen on TV. On any given day you can witness anger, grief, happiness, apathy, despair and disbelief, sometimes from the same person. There are performances of great skill alongside acts of sheer incompetence. Decisions are made which affect lives for many years, if not forever.

Courtrooms can also be boring. So soul-destroyingly, mindnumbingly tedious that you wonder why mankind even exists. Sometimes it seems like you’ve been waiting a whole day for one ten-second event that didn’t quite match up to your expectations anyway. Sometimes nothing happens at all, at a cost so extravagant that you might feel nostalgic for the ‘good old days’ when criminals were caught, tried and executed before teatime.

We all intuitively know the system is dull, especially if we work 9 to 5 office jobs, but like most dull things we prefer not to think about them. We focus on the interesting things, just like journalists. We summarise an event when retelling it as an anecdote (or at least we should do). And so, when we do think about the system we are surprised all over again by how incredibly dull and time-consuming and wasteful it is.

This is what happened when West Midlands Police decided to send five press officers into Birmingham Magistrates Court to tweet the results of every case during a morning session on April 19.

Leaving aside the fact it took five press officers to do it (now you see why newspapers appear to neglect court reporting), the results were hailed as both ‘fascinating’ and ‘a waste of time and funding.’ And the Daily Mail wasn’t impressed either.

Some examples:

A 60 yr old female suspected shoplifter appeared in court for stealing flour and a cucumber. Adjourned until next week.

24 yr old Yardley man fined £200 fine £65 compensation for stealing electric fans and a mirror as the queue was too long!

22 yr old woman from northfield pleads not guilty to assaulting her daughter.adjourned until june for further evidence and trial

39 yr old man who stole £8.99 bottle of wine receives £15 fine to be deducted from his benefits

41 yr old erdington man given total of 20 weeks for 1 count assault on a police officer and 1 count common assault

30 yr old man accused of robbery of a mobile phone.remanded in custody for birmingham crown court

39 yr old bordesley green man fined £1,070 for no tv licence and failure to provide driving licence

A few of these might have warranted a paragraph or three in the local paper. Others are interesting purely because they shed light on something we tend not to think about. You can get fined £1,000 for having no TV licence? You can get taken to court for stealing a cucumber? We sort of knew this already, but still. We leave the bureaucracy to the bureaucrats so we can get on with more interesting things. Right?

What you read in the newspapers is what you see when you go to the cinema – the finished product. The dross, the repetition, the tedium has been weeded out and what is left is the highlights. It’s like watching the football without the delays, the half time intermission and the tedious passing around midfield that never goes anywhere. Like Hollywood films the result can be criticised for lacking in quality, but it’s been created for our entertainment.

Having said that, most local newspapers used to have a ‘Look Who’s In Court’ section. That stopped at one place I worked at because the court started charging money for the paper list, meaning a reporter would have to drop all the other exciting tasks like captioning school pageant photos to get down there. These days it doesn’t make financial sense to report the courts unless it’s a really big story.

Which is why the ‘tweetathon’ was a good idea – as a one-off. It did its job in opening up the Magistrates Courts for a morning. It educated, or at least readjusted, people to the reality of the justice system. But nobody wants a non-stop stream of court results fed directly to their brain, just like they don’t want to hear someone else’s thoughts all day and every day. There has to be a filter somewhere.

That doesn’t mean we should have to rely on a journalist or a posse of press officers. In this digital world, the Magistrates Courts should really publish the results themselves. They are already recorded on a computer system, it’s just we don’t have access to it. Once out there, the ‘internet’ would do the work. Significant results would be flagged up, passed on, commented upon and investigated. All without the cost that mitigates against a human being sitting in court all day waiting for a story that might never happen.

For an example of which, see here. Why Wigan should be the forerunner of this, I have no idea…

Teddy Highwood: Family of murder victim ‘failed by police and the IPCC’

Where do you go when you believe you have been failed by the police in their handling of a murder enquiry? This is the story of one family’s decision to complain to the Independent Complaints Commission.

Seventy-nine year-old Teddy Highwood was bludgeoned to death at his home on July 17, 2009. His killer, 20 year-old Marcin Orlowski, was a Polish man with previous convictions for mugging elderly victims.

Edward Highwood
Teddy Highwood

Four days before the murder Orlowski had dialled 999 and told the operator through an interpreter: ‘I should be in prison in Poland, I think, and now I have decided I don’t want to run away anymore. I just want to be arrested and be extradited to Poland. I should be in prison for about three years.’

Orlowski was telling the truth – he had fled Poland as he was about to start a prison sentence – but UK police were unaware of this and there was no record on the national database.

After two further calls, the response of a police officer was to say: ‘It is a minor offence, when he goes back to Poland he should hand himself in. We cannot help him get back.’

Orlowski was given the number of the Polish Community Helpline and it was suggested he go to the Polish Embassy, but he ended up sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square with a bottle of cider.

The family of Teddy Highwood say this wasn’t good enough. Not only that, they believe Teddy’s murder could have been prevented if the 999 calls had been taken seriously and Orlowski had been detained by police.

In August 2010 Mr Highwood’s great nephew John Morris took up the case with the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), with the help of his local MP Jackie Doyle-Price.

The process – which ended in the complaint being dismissed earlier this month – has left him feeling let down and disillusioned.

When it was set up by the Home Office in 2004, the IPCC was meant to reassure the public that complaints against the police would be treated seriously.

Instead it has been dogged by allegations of favouritism, given that many of its investigators are former officers, and a catalogue of basic failures. Its current director of investigations, Moir Stewart, was himself criticised for failings in relation to the handling of the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes. And it has been accused of trying to obstruct journalists investigating the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests.

As it happens, the IPCC decided not to investigate the Teddy Highwood complaint itself and passed it to the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) for a ‘Local Investigation.’ The DPS, which also investigates police corruption, is part of the Metropolitan Police.

“The people who investigated this were the police themselves,” says Mr Morris. “It’s absolutely ridiculous that they investigate their own incompetence.”

According to the DPS report, Orlowski ‘appeared incoherent and rambling’ when he dialled 999 on July 13, 2009, and a check by officers revealed no information about him on the Police National Computer.

It continues: ‘Having established that Mr Orlowski was not in danger or posed any risk, he was then advised not to use the emergency 999 system for this purpose again. It should be noted that Mr Orlowski made no reference to Mr Highwood and made no threats to police.’

As to why he was not detained by police, there was ‘insufficient capacity to despatch operation police units to this type of call’.

It also appears that UK police have no power to arrest suspects for offences committed abroad unless there is a European Arrest Warrant.

In conclusion: ‘It is unlikely that Mr Highwood’s death could have been prevented by alternative action being carried out… Mr Orlowski could not have been detained.’

John Morris is quite blunt about his disappointment. “They think it’s good enough – they didn’t take it seriously.

“He’s actually asked for help. They would have took this guy and held him, then rung the Polish authorities. If they had done that then Teddy wouldn’t have been murdered.”

In fairness to the police, they do set out a series of recommendatons (usually known as ‘lessons to be learned’) including risk assessment training for 999 operators and further improvement to the ‘European data system’.

But the public might be surprised that a man wanted in Poland could enter the UK so easily, just because no European Arrest Warrant had been issued by the Polish authorities.

Even the Met admits ‘it is of significant concern to this organisation that EU nationals may be unlawfully at large in the UK.’

John Morris now intends to campaign for tougher border controls, including criminal checks.

He said: “Someone could be a murderer and we know nothing about their background. Letting people in to a country without simple checks is wrong.”

Mr Morris added: “It’s not about money. Teddy was a pillar of the community and he did a lot of charity work. I told the police ‘We feel you made an error and we would like you do make a donation to the charities that Teddy worked for.’ They weren’t happy about that.”