The Supreme Court allowed Eric Wansboro’s appeal concerning the reactivation of a suspended sentence under section 99(10) of the Criminal Justice Act 2006. O’Donnell J.’s judgment, delivered on 20 December 2018, agrees with the judgment of Dunne J. and its conclusions. The source supplied here contains O’Donnell J.’s reasons, but not Dunne J.’s judgment or the court’s formal order.
Wansboro had pleaded guilty to a further offence that triggered consideration of his suspended sentence. The sentencing judge dealt with reactivation and the sentence for that offence before the judge. O’Donnell J. said there was no prospect of the guilty plea being overturned, and no injustice of the kind that could arise if a trigger-offence conviction were later set aside.
Section 99(10) required a sentencing court to revoke a suspended sentence unless it considered revocation unjust, before imposing sentence for the new offence. In Moore v Director of Public Prosecutions, the High Court had declared sections 99(9) and 99(10) invalid; that decision was not appealed. O’Donnell J. described the appeal as an attempt to rely on that invalidity to quash reactivation in Wansboro’s case.
The judgment raises concerns about the consequences. O’Donnell J. said quashing reactivation without later reconsideration could allow Wansboro to avoid the suspended sentence while retaining a sentence for the triggering offence that had been assessed on the basis of both periods of imprisonment. He also noted that section 99(17) might offer an alternative route to reactivation, though that possibility was uncertain and had not been resolved in the supplied judgment.
The court’s reasoning focused on whether Wansboro could raise the invalidity issue in his appeal. Although he had filed his notice without legal representation and it might have appeared to concern sentence severity, O’Donnell J. said an appellate court would not necessarily prevent him from raising a point about the sentencing court’s jurisdiction to reactivate the sentence. He agreed with Dunne J. that the appeal should be allowed. The supplied text does not state what further relief, if any, was ordered.