Sweeting: Third investigation in three years
A High Court judge has received his second formal warning in less than three months for a delay in handing down judgment.
Mr Justice Derek Sweeting also previously received the lower sanction of formal advice after a delayed judgment in 2023.
But the Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr, and Lord Chancellor David Lammy, decided that a more serious sanction “would be disproportionate on this occasion”, according to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO).
The JCIO reported yesterday that it had received a complaint from a solicitor concerning a delay of approximately 20 months in handing down a judgment following a hearing in April 2023. They said they had contacted the court several times to chase the outstanding judgment.
In response, the judge said he had “overlooked” the judgment and largely attributed this to “sustained and unusually heavy workload pressures”, including repeated short notice deployment to complex criminal trials.
He also explained that during a period of transition in clerking arrangements, he failed to record the case within his tracking system.
Sweeting J further stated that he was unaware at the time of the solicitor’s chaser correspondence.
The ‘nominated judge’ – charged with investigating the complaint – found that Sweeting J had failed to deliver judgment within a reasonable time, and that the delay of over 20 months amounted to misconduct.
The investigation found that around six months after post-hearing submissions had been provided, assurances had been given that the judgment would soon be delivered, meaning Sweeting J had been aware it was outstanding.
“The nominated judge found that in the months that followed, the outstanding judgment then came to be forgotten by the judge. While administrative failures were relevant background, they did not displace the judge’s personal responsibility.
The Lady Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor accepted the nominated judge’s recommendation of a formal warning.
In doing so, they took into account the two previous sanctions issued to the judge for delayed judgments: formal advice in 2023 and the formal warning in April, which concerned delays of eight months and 11 months respectively in handing down judgment on two cases heard in 2024.
The JCIO said that “after careful consideration”, Baroness Carr and Mr Lammy “concluded that a more serious sanction would be disproportionate on this occasion, given the overlap in time with the previous incidents of delay and the fact that there have been no further complaints of delay requiring investigation in the meantime”.
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