The Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the Director of Public Prosecutions’ appeal and affirmed J.C.’s jury acquittal, ordering no retrial. In a judgment delivered on 22 June 2015, Mr Justice John Murray said a retrial under a rule of law changed after the trial would be contrary to the interests of justice.
The appeal concerned section 23 of the Criminal Procedure Act 2010, which allows the DPP to seek to have an acquittal set aside and a new trial ordered in specified circumstances. In an earlier stage of the appeal, the Court’s majority had decided that the trial judge’s ruling, though correct under the law as it stood at the time, could be treated retrospectively as erroneous for the purposes of the section.
Justice Murray said the trial judge had applied the law as she was required to apply it. He considered it manifestly unjust to retry someone acquitted by a jury because the law changed after the trial. He said the changed rule was a decisive reason against a retrial in this type of case, and that an appeal under section 23 in such circumstances would fail.
The opinion records that J.C. had been charged four years before and tried three years before. It says there was no suggestion or argument that a retrial would be conducted unfairly, and that the DPP had offered no evidence about the interests of any victim. Justice Murray described the offences as robbery, serious public order offences involving the use or threat of violence. He said the passage of time and the other specified factors did not provide a separate decisive reason to refuse a retrial.
Justice Murray noted that the DPP could have raised the legal issue through an appeal under section 34 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1967, without putting the acquittal at risk. He said section 23 did not give the DPP a right to appeal solely to seek review of a Supreme Court precedent. The Court’s order, as stated in the judgment, was to dismiss the appeal and leave the acquittal in place; no retrial was ordered.