A Crown court judge has expressed surprise after a prosecutor said they could not give details of a domestic abuser’s previous conviction because it had been deleted under a CPS ‘retention policy’. The judge was sentencing Floyd Johnson for assault occasioning actual bodily harm, over an incident in which Johnson punched his former partner in the face. Johnson’s car had broken down on a motorway and he had become angry after the victim refused his demands to pay for recovery services.
Johnson, 58 and of no fixed abode, had 28 convictions for 35 offences, most recently including a previous battery of a woman, for which he was in court in 2022, the court heard.
Laura Jones, prosecuting, said in court she was unable to tell the judge the facts of the 2022 battery case because of the CPS ‘retention policy’. ‘Due to the timeframe, it is no longer on their system due to the retention policy’, Jones said, but added the offence was ‘against a female’.
Recorder Henry Gordon, sitting at Reading Crown Court, expressed surprised, questioning ‘from 2022?’ But the prosecutor confirmed there were no further details about the background to that offence.
Kwame Sekyere, when dealing with the 2022 battery conviction in mitigation, asked the judge to take into account that ‘we do not have the facts of that’.
It is understood that, because battery is a summary-only offence, the CPS policy is to retain the information for only one year, to comply with data protection laws. In order to access it after that, prosecutors have to apply to the police, who hold the information on the police national computer.
Gordon jailed Johnson for one year, telling him: ‘You have multiple offences of violence throughout your offending history’.
The CPS was contacted for comment.
2 Readers' comments