Court of Appeal: Solicitors were rightly criticised
The Court of Appeal has upheld the safety of a man’s conviction for rape despite the Legal Ombudsman criticising his solicitors’ poor conduct of the case.
Mrs Justice Stacey, giving the court’s ruling, said that his barrister had made up for their shortcomings.
The applicant, ‘PG’, was convicted in 2018 of three counts of rape, four counts of indecent assault, one count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, one count of indecency with a child and one count of cruelty to a person under the age of 16. Some charges were dismissed, however.
The prosecution case principally consisted of the witness evidence of the three complainants. PG’s barrister was able to cross-examine them and succeeded in obtaining a ruling admitting bad character evidence about one of them.
PG’s unnamed solicitors were later “rightly criticised” by the Legal Ombudsman for the way in which they had prepared the case, Stacey J recorded.
She said: “It must have been very concerning for him in the run up to trial and we well understand how he had lost confidence in his solicitors. But it is not reasonably arguable that any of the criticisms had had an impact on the outcome of the applicant’s case.
“His solicitors had instructed a capable barrister, whom he does not criticise, who was able to remedy the problems that the solicitors had created. None of the missed deadlines prejudiced the trial as the trial judge overlooked all of them.
“Because the judge had to discharge the first jury five days into the trial for unrelated reasons – when a juror felt unable to continue because of the nature of the evidence – it meant that the applicant’s barrister had plenty of time to view all the USB sticks that the solicitors had not provided to him earlier, to obtain full instructions from his client and to fully familiarise himself with all the papers.”
The court said the solicitors accepted the criticisms of their “unreasonable behaviour” by the ombudsman.
“But there is no causal link between the guilty verdicts and the solicitor’s shortcomings for the reasons we have explained.”
Dismissing the other grounds of complaint, the court held that “there was in fact considerable prosecution evidence on which the jury could be sure that entitled them to convict and a fair trial was conducted as evidenced by the mixed verdicts”.
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