The High Court ordered that F.X. be released from his existing detention at 5pm on 10 July 2012, after holding that his custody was unlawful. The short delay was intended to give authorities time to take steps they considered appropriate to make any continued detention lawful.
In a judgment delivered on 8 July 2012, Mr Justice Hogan addressed whether the release order could be stayed after his earlier ruling, delivered on 3 July, that the detention was unlawful. The applicant was being held at the Central Mental Hospital under a Central Criminal Court order made on 26 March 2012 under section 4(5)(c)(i) of the Criminal Law (Insanity) Act 2006.
The judgment said the applicant had been found unfit to plead in relation to a serious criminal charge. It recorded a diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia resistant to treatment and described medical evidence that he posed a serious risk to himself, identifiable individuals and the public if released. Those risks formed part of the court’s consideration of the timing of release; the court did not determine any fresh criminal charge in this judgment.
The hospital’s clinical director and the Director of Public Prosecutions argued that the court could stay release to allow steps to regularise the detention. Counsel for the applicant argued that the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in SC v Clinical Director of the Jonathan Swift Clinic precluded such a stay. Hogan J rejected that broad reading: he said SC had not decided whether a stay could ever be granted and turned on its facts, including the absence there of evidence that the patient posed a danger.
Hogan J followed the approach in earlier High Court cases, including J.H. v Russell, which recognised a limited power to delay the effect of release in exceptional circumstances involving people detained for their own good and posing a threat to themselves or others. He stressed that release must still follow within a short period.
The judge noted that the Director of Public Prosecutions intended to seek a re-listing before the Central Criminal Court on 9 July. He said that application was a matter for that court. The hospital’s representative also reserved the right to apply for a fresh detention order under the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction; Hogan J expressed no view on that possibility.
The order concerned release from the existing custody. It did not itself decide whether a new, lawful basis for detention would be established before the deadline.