Chirnside, R. v

Sentencing for armed robbery requires an assessment of the robbery’s target, planning, expected proceeds, weapon, and the offender’s role. Indicative starting points for smaller commercial robberies and for firearm bank or security-van robberies are guides, not fixed tariffs.

A substantial reduction may be required where an offender was a subsidiary participant recruited and acting under serious threats. The offender’s voluntary exposure to that pressure, and any personal benefit from the crime, remain relevant to culpability. An early guilty plea and previous effective good character must also receive proper allowance.

The appellant pleaded guilty at the Crown Court at Newcastle upon Tyne to robbing a security guard delivering cash to an automated teller machine. He used a machete to seize a cash box containing £20,000 and escaped in a waiting car.

He maintained, on a factual basis accepted for sentence, that a man to whom he owed money from drug-related borrowing had threatened him, his estranged wife and his children, and directed him to commit the robbery. The Crown Court imposed six years’ imprisonment on 3 November 2004, treating the plea as an early one.

He appealed on the ground that the sentence insufficiently reflected both the early plea and his role as a threatened, subsidiary offender.

1. Appeal allowed. The six-year sentence was quashed and replaced with a sentence of four and a half years’ imprisonment.

2. The robbery was highly serious. It was a planned attack on a security cash delivery, involved a machete, and sought £20,000. Its professional features and expected proceeds placed it above the ordinary small-shop, garage or sub-post-office robberies considered in Attorney General's References 3, 4, 8 to 11 and 16 [1990] 12 Cr. App. R. (S) 479. It did not, however, reach the 15-year post-trial starting point associated by R v Turner (1975) 61 Cr. App. R. 67 with bank or security-van robberies involving serious firearms. A principal offender, if convicted after trial, would nevertheless have faced a sentence in double figures.

3. The appellant retained substantial responsibility. His drug misuse had led to the debt, he had sought a loan from a man whose violent reputation he knew, and he obtained the cancellation of the debt plus about £2,000 from the robbery. Yet the accepted facts established that he was a subsidiary offender, recruited to act on instructions and under threat. That materially reduced his culpability.

4. A notional post-trial starting point of about nine years therefore gave insufficient weight to those unusual mitigating circumstances. The proper starting point was about seven years after trial. Giving proper credit for the early guilty plea, effective previous good character, regret and rehabilitation from drugs, the appropriate sentence was four and a half years.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Allowed the appeal against sentence, quashed the six-year term, and substituted four and a half years’ imprisonment.

• Crown Court at Newcastle upon Tyne Following a guilty plea to robbery, imposed six years’ imprisonment on 3 November 2004. No citation was stated in the judgment.