R v Matthew James Banner & Anor

For ill-treatment of a person in care under Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, ill-treatment is an ordinary expression which requires no judicial gloss. The prosecution must prove deliberate conduct properly capable of being characterised as ill-treatment, and knowledge or recklessness that the conduct was inexcusable. Those requirements confine the offence to its proper bounds.

The offence does not require proof that the conduct caused suffering or injury to health. Where the evidence permits competing inferences about the defendant’s conduct and state of mind, the issue is for the jury and should not be withdrawn at half time.

The appellants were senior healthcare workers at a hospital caring for detained adults with learning disabilities and complex needs. They were convicted at Teesside Crown Court of offences of ill-treatment of a person in care under section 20 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015.

The convictions arose from filmed interactions with two residents. The appellants contended that references to balloons, speaking French, and related conduct were benign distraction or de-escalation techniques. They appealed on the grounds that the judge should have stopped the relevant counts and should have given a fuller definition of ill-treatment.

The central issues were whether the statutory term required further judicial definition and whether the evidence was capable of supporting the jury’s verdicts.

1. Appeals dismissed. The trial judge correctly left the relevant counts to the jury and correctly directed it on the offence under section 20 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015.

2. Ill-treatment is an ordinary expression of the English language. It should not be given a judicial gloss or restricted by importing adjectives used in counsel’s speeches. The required safeguards lie in the elements of the offence: the prosecution must prove deliberate conduct properly describable as ill-treatment and prove that the defendant knew that the resident was being inexcusably ill-treated, or was reckless as to that question. That approach followed R v Newington (1990) 91 Cr App R 247.

3. Section 20 does not require proof of suffering or injury to health. Parliament had included a harm-related requirement in section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, but omitted it from section 127 of the Mental Health Act 1983 and the materially identical provision in the 2015 Act. The omission was significant and could not be supplied by a direction to the jury.

4. The evidence raised factual issues about the appellants’ purpose, whether their conduct was a good-faith distraction technique, and whether it was inexcusable ill-treatment with the required state of mind. Those were matters for the jury after hearing the whole evidence. Applying R v Galbraith [1981] 1 WLR 1039, there was a case to answer. The jury’s acquittals on another count also demonstrated that it had assessed the evidence discriminately.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division): The appellants’ conviction appeals were dismissed.
• Crown Court at Teesside: On 27 April 2023, Bennett was convicted on two counts and Banner on five counts of ill-treatment of a person in care under section 20 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015. On 19 January 2024, each received four months’ imprisonment, suspended for 18 months, with 280 hours’ unpaid work.