R v Susan Goose

In a serious and prolonged fraud, a sentencing judge may adopt a global starting point modestly above the guideline starting point where the victims’ harm is devastating, the offending is sustained, the loss remains substantial, and further offences are taken into consideration. The court may infer an absence of remorse from a defendant’s conduct during victim impact evidence; remorse requires genuine acceptance of the consequences of the offending. Personal tragedies carry no mitigating weight where the offender exploited those same circumstances to deceive victims. A lack of convictions may have little weight where prolonged dishonesty simply remained undetected. Unsupported assertions of addiction, ill health or other personal mitigation need not affect sentence.

The appellant pleaded guilty at the Crown Court at Norwich to five fraud offences. Two further offences were taken into consideration. She had induced sympathetic victims to give her money through repeated false accounts of personal need, causing a minimum total loss of £426,769 and grave personal consequences for the victims.

On 26 April 2024, the judge imposed six years’ imprisonment. The offences were agreed to involve culpability A. Although the financial loss fell within harm category 2, the judge treated the devastating impact on the victims as placing the case in category 1. He selected a global starting point of eight years and allowed a 25 per cent discount for the guilty pleas.

The appeal challenged the uplift from the seven-year category A1 starting point and the judge’s treatment of personal mitigation.

1. Appeal dismissed. The sentence of six years’ imprisonment was neither wrong in principle nor manifestly excessive.
2. The court upheld the eight-year global starting point. The case was properly classified as category A1: culpability could not have been higher and the victims’ harm was devastating. The modest uplift from the seven-year guideline starting point was justified by the offending’s duration from 2017 to 2024, the substantial net loss, and the two further offences taken into consideration. The judge had also been entitled to avoid consecutive sentences and impose one sentence reflecting the whole course of offending. Indeed, a higher starting point could have been justified.
3. The judge was entitled to find that the appellant lacked remorse. Her head-shaking while victim impact statements were read supported an inference that she did not accept the consequences of her conduct. Remorse required more than an expression of apology to the probation service.
4. The appellant’s personal tragedies did not mitigate sentence. She had deployed the death of her daughter and her mother’s frailty as instruments of her frauds. Even if those matters could also be viewed as mitigating, any such weight was cancelled by their aggravating role. Her lack of previous convictions carried very little weight because the frauds continued for seven years before she was caught.
5. The late material did not substantiate a gambling addiction, financial support for her son’s drug use, or other mitigation capable of reducing the term. The limited repayments and subsequent cancer diagnosis did not alter the conclusion. The agreed 25 per cent guilty-plea reduction was correct.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Dismissed the appeal against sentence: [2024] EWCA Crim 1335.
• Crown Court at Norwich On 26 April 2024, imposed six years’ imprisonment after guilty pleas to five fraud offences, with two further offences taken into consideration.