The Supreme Court has ruled that a man acquitted by reason of insanity after a retrial was entitled to a certificate declaring a miscarriage of justice, because the jury’s verdict demonstrated his innocence in the specific context of the insanity defence.
The ruling, delivered by Mr Justice Peter Charleton on 30 May 2022, followed the man’s conviction for murdering his infant son in 2003. At the retrial in December 2019, a jury returned a special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The man had argued that newly discovered facts about his mental illness showed the earlier conviction was fundamentally wrong.
The Supreme Court rejected the prosecution’s argument that the man had not been acquitted because he had carried out the physical acts that caused his son’s death. It held that a special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity is an acquittal for the purposes of section 9 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993.
The Court explained that insanity negates criminal responsibility because criminal liability requires both the prohibited act and a guilty mental state. At the retrial, psychiatric experts agreed that the man had paranoid schizophrenia when he killed his son. The jury found, on the balance of probabilities, that he was acting under the grip of insanity at the time.
The case had returned to court after the man’s treatment in the Central Mental Hospital, including a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia in 2013. The Court of Appeal ordered a retrial in 2019, finding that the later medical material could have influenced the original jury’s assessment of the expert evidence. At the 2003 retrial, the jury had convicted the man of murder by a 10–2 majority, rejecting his insanity defence.
The Supreme Court distinguished the changed psychiatric diagnosis from a fundamental failure in the justice system. It said that a psychiatrist revising an opinion with greater experience and treatment reports did not, by itself, amount to an affront to justice. But, because the insanity verdict established the absence of criminal responsibility and demonstrated innocence in this case, the Court concluded that the statutory test was met.
The Court ordered that a certificate issue. The judgment addresses entitlement to the certificate; it does not determine any compensation amount. Under the 1993 Act, compensation is a separate matter for the Minister for Justice, subject to the statutory process.