Stone, R v

Directions about an alleged confession to a fellow prisoner must be tailored to the evidence. A detailed warning will usually be appropriate where a short cell confession could readily be fabricated, or where the evidence discloses a possible improper motive or a significant history of dishonesty. There is no automatic rule requiring such a direction merely because the informant is a remand prisoner.

Fresh material about a witness does not make a conviction unsafe where it adds little to serious defects already exposed before the jury and does not materially undermine the witness’s evidence on the decisive issue.

Following a retrial at Nottingham Crown Court, the appellant was convicted of two murders and an attempted murder. The prosecution case depended centrally on evidence from Damien Daley, a remand prisoner who said that the appellant had confessed through a pipe between adjoining segregation cells.

The appellant challenged the adequacy of the judge’s directions concerning Daley’s bad character, alleged motives and the dangers of prison-informer evidence. He also relied on fresh material concerning Daley’s drug addiction, behaviour and later dishonesty, and on proposed fresh evidence said to amount to a retraction. The central issues were whether the directions were legally inadequate and whether the fresh evidence rendered the convictions unsafe.

1. Appeal dismissed. The convictions were safe. The court declined to receive the proposed evidence of Gilheaney and refused leave on that ground. The alleged retraction was incapable of belief, having been contradicted by prison-location records, the absence of the supposed television broadcast, and other features of the account.
2. Fresh evidence of Daley’s substantial heroin addiction and further dishonesty did not materially weaken his evidence of the confession. The jury already knew that he was a hardened criminal, had lied when it suited him, had lied on oath, and had taken drugs. There was no evidence that withdrawal or a desire to obtain drugs gave him a motive to invent the confession. Evidence of drunken and bizarre conduct, and a later drug conviction, added no material basis for doubting the verdicts.
3. Applying Pringle [2003] UKPC 9 and Benedetto v The Queen and Labrador v The Queen [2003] UKPC 27, the court held that alleged cell confessions require careful judicial consideration but are not governed by fixed warning rules. A warning will generally be needed where a simple confession could easily be concocted, or where evidence indicates an improper motive or a significant history of lying. The necessary content and strength of any warning depend on the particular case.
4. Here, the alleged confession contained detailed matters whose invention could be assessed against Daley’s access to public information. A general direction that cell confessions are easy to fabricate would therefore have served no useful purpose. Nor was a warning about a possible hope of advantage required merely because Daley was a remand prisoner. No such motive had been put in cross-examination, and the evidence did not otherwise establish it.
5. The trial judge adequately directed the jury to examine Daley’s evidence with great care because of his criminal background, to convict only if sure that he was truthful, and to take account of his admissions of lying. The judge’s neutral observation that bad character does not itself prove untruthfulness did not amount to a misdirection. The remaining circumstantial evidence also implicated the appellant.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) — dismissed the appeal against conviction: [2005] EWCA Crim 105.
• Nottingham Crown Court — following a retrial before Poole J, convicted the appellant on 4 October 2001 of two murders and attempted murder and imposed life sentences.
• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) — on 8 February 2001 quashed the convictions from the first trial and ordered a retrial because a prosecution witness, Thompson, had retracted evidence and was shown to be hopelessly unreliable.
• Maidstone Crown Court — convicted the appellant on the same counts on 23 October 1998.