Steel, R v

Where a conviction depends essentially on a disputed confession, credible fresh expert evidence showing an accused’s previously unrecognised intellectual impairment and susceptibility to suggestion or compliance may render the conviction unsafe. The safety inquiry is not conditional upon proving a breach of the rules governing police questioning at the time. Those rules, and later safeguards, provide important context for assessing whether the new evidence could have altered the jury’s evaluation of the confession.

Anthony Steel appealed against his 1979 murder conviction following a reference by the Criminal Cases Review Committee. The Crown case had depended almost entirely on his alleged oral and written confessions after police interviews. At trial, Steel maintained that the admissions were false and resulted from police pressure.

Fresh reports from two consultant psychologists showed that he had a very low IQ and functioned at, or close to, abnormal levels of suggestibility and compliance. The Crown’s expert agreed that any confession obtained from him would be unsafe. The central issue was whether this new evidence, considered against the disputed confessions and the safeguards available during police questioning, made the conviction unsafe.

1. Appeal allowed; conviction quashed. The court received the three psychological reports as fresh evidence under section 23 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1968. It held that the conviction could no longer be regarded as safe.

2. The jury had been asked to decide the case essentially by determining whether Steel’s confessions were voluntary and truthful. The fresh evidence showed that he had a substantially lower level of intelligence, and greater vulnerability to suggestion and compliance, than the jury, judge and counsel could have appreciated at trial. That evidence could have materially changed the jury’s assessment both of the alleged confessions and of his account of the interviews.

3. Following the approach in R v Ashley King [2000] 2 Cr App R 391, the court stressed that the question was the safety of the conviction, not whether innocence had been established. The combination of low intelligence with borderline abnormal suggestibility and compliance made Steel particularly vulnerable during lengthy police interviews conducted without the protections now available.

4. A breach of the rules then governing questioning was not a condition precedent to finding the conviction unsafe. The historic rules and the later protections in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 explained why the new evidence bore directly on reliability and the risk of a miscarriage of justice. Even without police abuse, a highly vulnerable suspect might not have been recognised as such.

5. The court also considered it strongly arguable that the trial judge should have admitted the solicitor’s evidence about Steel’s immediate retraction of the confession. It was relevant to rebut the Crown’s suggested inference that the solicitor had caused the retraction, rather than to prove the confession false. That point was not determinative because the conviction was already unsafe.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division): On a Criminal Cases Review Committee reference, the court allowed the appeal and quashed the conviction: [2003] EWCA Crim 1640.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division): In 1981, Steel’s earlier application for leave to appeal against conviction was unsuccessful.

• Leeds Crown Court: Boreham J and a jury convicted Steel of murder on 13 December 1979. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.