The High Court has refused an application by Robert Lloyd Heywood for release from an order surrendering him to the United Kingdom to face trial on three alleged offences: possession of heroin for supply and two counts of assault causing grievous bodily harm.
Mr Justice Michael Peart ruled that the period between the earliest alleged offence date, 1 August 1995, and the surrender order on 11 April 2006 amounted to an exceptional lapse of time. But he found no additional exceptional circumstances to support relief under section 50(2)(bbb) of the Extradition Act 1965, as amended. Because that requirement was not met, he said the court could not proceed to decide whether surrender would be unjust, oppressive or invidious.
The judgment records that Heywood had lived in Ireland since January 1997, and that UK authorities learned of his whereabouts in January 1998. Warrants issued in October 1998, and he was arrested in Ireland in January 1999. A District Court surrender order followed in May 1999. He spent about two years and five months in custody before being released in July 2001 after a judge found his continued detention unlawful.
He was arrested again in February 2002 on the original warrants, which the Supreme Court held were spent. New warrants issued in the UK in November 2002 and were backed in Ireland in August 2003. He was rearrested the following month. The High Court refused his constitutional release challenge in September 2003, and his appeal also failed.
In February 2004, the High Court refused the section 47 surrender application. The Supreme Court allowed an appeal in March 2006 and remitted the matter. A surrender order was made on 11 April 2006. Heywood was released on bail on 28 April, and his section 50 application was heard in July.
Peart J said some periods of delay by the authorities after 2001 had not been explained, including the time before the 2002 rearrest and the later issue and transmission of fresh warrants. However, he did not consider those delays, separately from the overall passage of time, to amount to other exceptional circumstances. He also found no specific evidence that delay had impaired the defence, such as a witness becoming unavailable. A general assertion that a fair trial might be harder after ten or eleven years was insufficient.
The court declined to assume that UK courts would fail to credit custody time if Heywood were convicted, saying sentencing was for the trial court. It also rejected the argument that the warrants’ failure to give precise offence dates made a fair trial impossible. The application for relief was refused; the judgment did not decide the trial’s outcome or the sentence, if any.