The Court of Appeal has heaped praise on the lawyers who spotted that a jailed man was unlawfully serving an indeterminate sentence and secured his release from prison.
The appellant in Haycock v R had been convicted in 2006 and handed a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP), with a minimum term of 30 months.
Haycock, then 27, had pleaded guilty to three offences – controlling prostitution for gain and two counts of assaults occasioning actual bodily harm. As the law stood at the time of sentencing, an IPP sentence could be imposed only where a person had committed a ‘serious offence’, which was defined as a specified offence and one punishable by at least 10 years in prison.
According to the Criminal Justice Act 2003, Haycock’s offence was not defined as a serious one and it was not open to the court to impose an IPP sentence.
The miscarriage emerged when solicitor Baxter Jephcott of London firm SL5 Legal was instructed to represent Haycock in his 12th parole review since he was sentenced in 2006.
Jephcott identified for the first time in this case that the IPP sentence had been unlawfully imposed and he instructed counsel Stephen Knight to represent Haycock at the Court of Appeal.
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Appeal judges agreed the IPP sentence was unlawful and described the appeal as ‘unanswerable’, quashing the sentence and substituting an extended sentence of seven years, comprising a five-year term and two-year extension.
That sentence had long since expired and Haycock was able to be released. Lord Justice Edis, vice president of the Court of Appeal criminal division, said in lead judgment: ‘We commend all members of the appellant’s current legal team for the commitment and speed with which they have worked to identify and curtail an enduring serious injustice.
‘Without their endeavours, it would not have been possible for this court to prevent the continuation of that injustice - indeed, it would never have come to light.’
After the judgment was handed down, Jephcott said: ‘What is particularly troubling in this case is that this was not a sentencing error on an evaluative question, it was a basic legal error.
‘The Crown court which imposed the sentence did not have the legal power to impose an IPP at all. Yet the sentence had remained in place for almost 20 years. It is troubling that at no point during Mr Haycock’s sentence, either the Ministry of Justice or Parole Board noted this basic error. Mr Haycock’s case was reviewed a dozen times, at times by senior judges of the Parole Board, and none of them noticed this problem.’
Haycock recalled that when he was first sentenced, his barrister had told him there were no grounds to appeal, and he had spent 20 years believing there was nothing he could do about his situation.
‘I was shocked when Baxter Jephcott told me that the IPP had been imposed unlawfully,’ he added. ‘I deeply regret what I did and the harm I caused. I have never sought to excuse my offending. But I did not deserve to spend 20 years of my life behind bars, and I am glad the Court of Appeal has recognised this today in this important judgment.’
According to Ministry of Justice statistics, as of 30 June this year, 856 ‘unreleased’ IPP prisoners were held in England and Wales. The number of ‘recalled’ IPP prisoners was 1,415, making 2,271 people serving IPP sentences in prison.
Lord Justice Edis noted there was no way of identifying how many of those sentences may have been imposed unlawfully. He stressed that the court did not want to give the impression that it would allow appeals in all cases where IPP sentences had been passed.
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