Pham, R v

Where the only alleged explanation for a confession is that police oppression or improper conduct induced a false admission, the jury should be directed to disregard the confession if it considers that the alleged conduct did, or may, have occurred. A direction which focuses primarily on truth rather than oppression is erroneous. It will not, however, render a conviction unsafe where the summing-up as a whole makes clear that the sole basis on which the confession could be untrue is the manner in which it was obtained, so that the two issues stand or fall together.

The appellant was convicted at Newport Crown Court of conspiracy to produce cannabis and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. The prosecution case against him depended entirely on admissions he made first to police officers and later in formal interviews.

He accepted making the admissions but contended that they were false. He alleged that officers had threatened to implicate him in a murder investigation unless he assisted them, causing him to confess to cannabis involvement instead. He did not seek a voir dire, but challenged the reliability of the admissions before the jury.

Appealing by leave of the single judge, he argued that the jury should have been directed to disregard the admissions unless satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that they had not been obtained by oppression or improper conduct.

1. Appeal dismissed. The conviction was safe, despite an error in the judge’s formulation of the issue for the jury.

2. Under Police and Criminal Evidence Act s 76(2), and consistently with R v Mushtaq [2005] UKHL 25, a jury considering a confession which has been admitted in evidence should be directed to disregard it if it considers that the confession was, or may have been, obtained by oppression or by conduct likely to render it unreliable. The judge should have followed that analysis more closely.

3. The judge had instead made the truth of the admissions the principal question. That was an error. The proper direction was that, if the appellant’s account of the oppressive or improper conduct was or might be true, the admissions were of no weight and could not be relied upon.

4. On the particular facts, however, there were no intermediate possibilities. The appellant’s sole case was that he made false admissions because he feared implication in the murder investigation. No case was advanced in which the admissions were obtained by oppression but were nevertheless true. The questions whether the admissions might have been induced by oppression and whether they might have been untrue therefore stood or fell together.

5. Read as a whole, the summing-up sufficiently directed the jury to the alleged threats and their possible effect on the appellant’s mind. It made clear that, if the jury could not be sure that the admissions were true, they had to disregard them; there was no other evidence against him. The misdirection did not create any unsafety.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division): The appellant’s conviction appeal, brought by leave of the single judge, was dismissed.
• Crown Court at Newport: On 12 February 2008, the appellant was convicted of conspiracy to produce cannabis and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.