Shirley, Re Attorney General's Reference No 55 of 2009

In assessing an offender for the dangerous-offender provisions, a sentencing judge may act on the material available. Further investigation is not required where that material does not establish, or reasonably indicate, a significant risk of death or serious personal injury from further offences.

Sentences for a series of robberies must reflect the total criminality. The court must avoid mechanically adding individual sentences, but an overall term must recognise that the offending was a series rather than an isolated crime. Serious home invasion, use of a convincing firearm, and actual violence require substantial aggravation.

The offender, aged 23, pleaded guilty at the first opportunity to three robberies committed within one week. The first was a planned robbery in the home of a couple in their sixties. The other two involved an imitation firearm, and the third involved repeated violence to a shopkeeper.

The sentencing judge imposed concurrent and consecutive terms totalling six and a half years' imprisonment. The Attorney General obtained leave under section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 to refer the sentences as unduly lenient. The reference raised whether the judge should have sought further material on dangerousness and whether the overall determinate term properly reflected the series of offences.

1. The reference was allowed. The sentences totalling six and a half years were unduly lenient. The court quashed them and imposed nine years' imprisonment on each robbery count, all concurrent. No separate penalty was imposed for the firearms counts because the use of the firearm had already been reflected in the robbery sentences.

2. The judge had been entitled not to pursue a further dangerousness investigation under sections 224 and following of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The material before him comprised the present offences and an incomplete record of previous convictions. The Crown supplied no details of the earlier robbery or the assaults on police officers, despite the judge's enquiry. On that material, the judge could conclude that there was insufficient basis to find, or to require investigation of, a significant risk of death or serious personal injury from further offences. A substantial determinate sentence also provided public protection.

3. The home robbery was more serious than Attorney General's Reference Nos 38 to 40 of 2007 (Crummack), [2008] 1 Cr App R (S) 56, and closer to R v Purcell, [2009] 1 Cr App R (S) 21. It did not, however, approach the exceptional gravity of R v O'Driscoll, [1986] 8 Cr App R (S) 121. Standing alone, it called for about nine or ten years after trial.

4. The judge's principal error was to add, in effect, only 18 months for the two later armed robberies. Sentences for multiple offences are not calculated by simple addition, but the overall sentence must reflect the fact of a series. Each armed robbery, if committed alone, would have warranted about eight or nine years after trial. The overall notional term after trial therefore had to be significantly into double figures; ten years was insufficient.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division): on the Attorney General's reference under section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, the court held the aggregate sentence unduly lenient and substituted concurrent nine-year robbery sentences: [2009] EWCA Crim 2689.
• Crown Court: following guilty pleas to three robberies and firearms offences, the sentencing judge imposed an aggregate term of six and a half years' imprisonment.