R v Kavian Vaughans & Anor

Hearsay admitted under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 remains subject to judicial control. Under section 124(2)(b), material undermining the reliability of an absent maker’s statement may be admitted, but the court retains discretion to confine it to the essential inconsistency and must avoid giving a non-testifying party an unfair opportunity to present an untested account. Expert evidence may explain unfamiliar slang, but the meaning of a speaker’s words in context is for the jury. A poor-quality recording may become relevant in cross-examination when the witness’s evidence makes it so, provided clear directions prevent speculation. An absent witness’s account need not be artificially truncated where its context is material. A secondary participant may receive the same sentence as the principal offender where culpability is properly found to be equivalent.

Following a 38-day trial at the Central Criminal Court, Kavian Vaughans and Abdul Yaro were convicted of murder on 2 August 2023. On 5 February 2024 they were sentenced to detention at His Majesty’s pleasure, with minimum terms of 21 years less 472 days spent on remand.

Vaughans renewed his application for leave to appeal conviction and appealed his sentence. Yaro renewed his application for leave to appeal conviction. The conviction challenges concerned the admission and treatment of prison telephone calls, a co-defendant’s defence statement, expert evidence about street slang, CCTV and doorbell audio, and an absent eyewitness’s statement. The sentence appeal concerned whether Vaughans should receive mitigation as a secondary party and the form of the minimum term after credit for remand.

Disposition. The renewed applications for leave to appeal conviction were refused. Vaughans’s sentence appeal was dismissed, subject only to a technical amendment recording the minimum term as 19 years and 258 days.

1. Prison calls and hearsay. The trial judge was entitled to treat the prison calls as hearsay, apply the interests-of-justice gateway in section 114(1)(d) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and consider the factors in section 114(2). The calls had significant probative value, could be heard and interpreted by the jury, could be challenged by the defence, and did not create prejudice requiring exclusion. Clear and even-handed directions adequately identified the evidential weaknesses.
2. Defence statement. Section 124(2)(b) made potentially admissible the parts of Yaro’s defence statement that undermined the prosecution interpretation of the calls. The provision did not remove the judge’s discretion as to whether and how the evidence should be presented. It was sufficient to put before the jury the essential inconsistency, namely that the statement did not implicate Vaughans and placed him to Yaro’s left, without allowing an untested self-defence account to be presented in full. The purpose of section 124(2) was consistent with R v BOB and others [2024] EWCA Crim 1494.
3. Expert and recording evidence. An expert could provide a lexicon explaining unfamiliar slang, but could not give an opinion on what a speaker meant in the particular conversation. That was for the jury. The CCTV officer’s departures from the permitted formulation did not render the conviction unsafe because repeated directions required the jury to form its own view and account for image limitations. The doorbell audio, initially excluded from the prosecution case because it was unclear, became relevant when Vaughans denied that any conversation had occurred. It could therefore be used in cross-examination and left with the jury, subject to a warning against amateur deciphering.
4. Absent eyewitness. The judge was entitled to admit the eyewitness statement in its edited form. Removing passages adverse to Yaro would have distorted evidence material to Vaughans’s case. The application relied on sections 116(2)(c), (d) and (e) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, so section 116(4) did not apply. In any event, careful directions sufficiently addressed the absence of cross-examination and the statement’s limitations.
5. Sentence. A secondary party may properly receive the same minimum term as the principal offender where the trial judge finds that both were integral participants in a joint offence and that no proper distinction in culpability exists. The judge was entitled to reach that conclusion on the evidence. Applying R v Sesay (Yousif) [2024] EWCA Crim 483, the sentence was technically restated after deducting the remand period.

• Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) — In [2025] EWCA Crim 9, the renewed conviction applications were refused and the sentence appeal was dismissed subject to recording the minimum term as 19 years and 258 days.
• Single judge — Leave to appeal conviction was refused. Leave was granted on the sentence ground concerning Vaughans’s alleged lesser role; leave was refused on the separate complaint about aggravating and mitigating features.
• Central Criminal Court — Vaughans and Yaro were convicted of murder on 2 August 2023 and sentenced on 5 February 2024 to detention at His Majesty’s pleasure, with minimum terms of 21 years less 472 days spent on remand.