Charles Crane [2019] EWCA Crim 1797

Charles Crane v Regina [2019] EWCA Crim 1797 concerned an appeal against sentence heard by Lord Justice Flaux, Mrs Justice McGowan and His Honour Judge Dean QC. The appeal was dismissed.

Mr Crane, who was thirty-eight years old at the time of appeal, had pleaded guilty on the day of trial, 4 December 2018, at the Crown Court sitting at Wood Green. On 12 February 2019 His Honour Judge Perrins sentenced him on count one, inflicting grievous bodily harm contrary to section 20 of the Offences Against the Persons Act 1861, to four years’ imprisonment; on count two, assault occasioning actual bodily harm contrary to section 47 of the same Act, to three years’ imprisonment consecutive; and on count three, theft contrary to section 1 of the Theft Act 1968, to ten months’ imprisonment concurrent, producing a total term of seven years’ imprisonment. The complainant in all counts was the same young woman. Leave to appeal was granted by the single judge.

The complainant had met Mr Crane when she was thirteen years of age and he was about thirty-three. She had been in the care system all her life and over recent years had been placed in eighteen different care homes. She had been born with foetal alcohol syndrome and had the mental age of a six-year-old. She had been repeatedly exploited and sexually abused by others in the past. She was regularly reported to the police as a missing person and all the care homes in the relevant areas attempted to monitor her whereabouts and well-being. Many attempts had been made to separate her from Mr Crane but those attempts had failed. There were constant reports to the police but she did not co-operate. A Child Abduction Warning Order was issued in September 2017 which Mr Crane had been served with and for which he had signed a receipt. It was believed that he had been in breach of that notice on many occasions although it had never been possible to bring successful charges. Police would attend his bedsit looking for the complainant but she would hide to prevent his getting into trouble.

Count one occurred on 19 May 2018. After college the complainant went to Mr Crane’s bedsit arriving in the early evening, about four or five o’clock. He had expected her to attend earlier and was very angry when she arrived. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her down a flight of stairs. He went to his neighbour’s address and the neighbour sought to intervene and tried to protect the complainant. Mr Crane punched the neighbour in the eye. He dragged the complainant back to his room where he continued to behave in a very angry fashion. She saw a metal hammer in the room and attempted to hide it so that he could not find it and use it. However he did find it and used it. He hit her with the metal handle twice over the head. She started to bleed from the wound and he held some clothing to the wound to try to stop the bleeding. She did not seek medical attention at the time and no photographs of the injury were taken on the day.

On 22 May 2018 somebody else made a report to the police following the complainant’s return to the care home and her telling somebody there about what had happened. She told the people at the care home that she believed she had broken a finger because he had forcefully pulled a ring off her left hand. She described the incident and said that as a consequence there had been blood all over the walls. When she was spoken to by the police she refused to make a statement. A photograph was taken by a social worker on 10 June which showed a small, healed scar to her scalp where the hair had been parted. On 9 June 2018 the complainant went to the police station and reported the matter. She had serious learning difficulties and was not in a position to give a coherent account of the lapse of time or the order in which events had occurred.

The second count occurred on 10 June. The complainant, believing that because the matter had been reported to the police Mr Crane would be in custody, went to his address to pick up some of her property. In fact he was there. She told him she was going to leave and go back to the care home. Again he became aggressive, telling her that she was not allowed to leave. He punched her to the left eye and to her arms and body causing bruising. He then demanded sex and they had sexual intercourse on the sofa. She was on her period but was not aware of that. He saw blood on the sofa afterwards and she described him as going mad as a consequence. He told her to lick the blood up. He took her knickers and showed them to the neighbours, telling them that she was a slut. He returned to his room and cut her trousers with a pair of scissors whilst she was still wearing them. He then pushed her out onto the street wearing just her bra and the ripped trousers. A member of the public came to her assistance, lent her a cardigan and an ambulance which was nearby came, took her to the North Middlesex Hospital where the full extent of her injuries was documented.

The consultant in the Accident and Emergency Department observed twelve injuries and documented them on three separate body maps. Those injuries included a swelling to the left eye which the complainant said had been caused when she was kicked on the ground or stamped on the head, a four centimetre scratch to the left cheek which she thought might have occurred when she was thrown to the ground, a seven centimetre scratch on her right shin which was healing by that stage and measured one centimetre wide at its widest which she said had occurred when Mr Crane had taken metal tools and scraped it along her leg the previous weekend, a two centimetre by two centimetre bruise to the back of her head caused when she was kicked or by being stamped on her head which had also occurred on 10 June, a linear scar to the left parietal region of the head about two centimetres in length caused when she had been hit by the hammer on 19 May, a one and a half centimetre brown bruise on the outer aspect of her upper left arm, a six centimetre brown bruise on the posterior aspect of her upper left arm, a circular one centimetre by one centimetre bruise, additionally a one and a half centimetre by one and a half centimetre bruise, a two centimetre by two centimetre bruise (these bruises understood to have occurred during the incident of the previous weekend on 2 and 3 June), an injury to her hand consisting of two scratches on the fourth finger of the left hand said to be caused on 10 June when the ring was grabbed from her finger, and a one centimetre by one centimetre bruise to the right ear which she said was caused by a stamp to her head.

Mr Crane was arrested on 13 June at his home address. At the police station he made the unsolicited comment that she was a child, he had never been in a relationship with a child and the police were saying it was a domestic but she was not even allowed to be at his premises. When his premises were searched the officers found papers from a pawnbrokers. The items listed were in fact items that the complainant had left at his bedsit, including a silver chain necklace, earrings and a tablet. It transpired that these items had been pawned at Cash Converters a few days earlier. When Mr Crane was interviewed he denied ever having a hammer and said there had never been one in his room. When it was pointed out that a hammer had been found in his flat he changed his account, saying that it may have been that a neighbour had come round with his tools to assist him hanging a picture and left the hammer there. When he was then asked if there was any reason why his DNA or fingerprints might be on the hammer, he said he had been helping the neighbour and may very well have touched the hammer. He said the complainant was causing him grief and he wished he had never met her. He did not talk to her, he never rang her and he did not even have her telephone number. He said that he had only met her beforehand on two previous occasions. He denied that they had ever had sex. He denied that they had been in a relationship for about a year, saying that he had been in prison and she was nothing to do with him. He denied inflicting the injuries, said the allegations were disturbing and denied having seen her for a long time. He denied that it was he who had cut her clothes or pushed her out onto the street half dressed. The victim had made a personal victim statement which was before the court.

The judge conducted a careful and thorough sentencing exercise. He set out the background to the relationship and how Mr Crane exercised an unnatural and unfair degree of pressure upon the very vulnerable young woman. In dealing with count one, the learned judge found there was greater harm on the basis of her vulnerability, the sustained nature of the assault, and higher culpability was substantiated by his use of the weapon and his deliberately targeting a vulnerable victim. For count two the judge placed the offence in category one. Again there was greater harm as a result of the serious injury, the vulnerability of the victim, the sustained nature of the attack, the deliberate targeting of her and using a shod foot as a weapon to inflict the various injuries. There were in addition statutory aggravating factors applying to both offences, namely the ongoing effect on the victim, the gratuitous degradation in relation to the second incident and the failure to respond to warnings previously given by the police when concerns had been raised about his behaviour, in particular the order that had been served on him. In addition the learned judge noticed and made observations about the plain abuse of power that existed in this relationship. It was not apparently in dispute that the theft was a category three offence and had a starting point of one year.

There were a number of previous convictions which related to drugs matters but, significantly, his list of previous convictions included offences of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and battery relating to another previous partner. The details of those matters were set out in the reports before the court and the learned judge observed that they included pulling that young woman off a bed onto broken glass, punching, slapping and dragging her across the floor. On that occasion he had been dealt with by way of a suspended sentence order which had included a requirement that he attended a Domestic Abuse Programme. The learned judge had the benefit of a number of reports. He described the pre-sentence report as very full. That report assessed Mr Crane as posing a high risk of serious harm to the victim and any potential future romantic or intimate partners, namely of serious physical violence, potentially involving the use of weapons, and psychological abuse, including threats, intimidation and emotional abuse. He was described in that report as somebody who carried attitudes around male dominance, control and entitlement and further that he trivialised, excused or justified violence against women. He had minimised his domestic abusive behaviour, displaced blame and externalised the causes of his behaviour.

The court went on to consider the psychiatric report provided at the request of the defence. That report made it plain that Mr Crane did suffer some mental health difficulties but that there was no evidence of his suffering from a major mental illness and that so far as the anxiety from which he suffered was concerned, that was linked to his misuse of drugs and alcohol. Significantly the report concluded that there was no evidence of his suffering from any acute mental health issues or crisis at the time of these incidents and there was no causal link between the problems that he had and the offences that he had committed. The learned judge observed that he had pleaded guilty as late as the day of the trial, when he had no doubt realised that the complainant was there and would be giving evidence and as a consequence his chances of acquittal were slim. In those circumstances there was no genuine remorse, but nonetheless the judge decided that he was entitled to ten per cent credit for his guilty plea. The judge described these incidents as violent and degrading assaults, committed on an extremely vulnerable teenager set against a background of exploitation, manipulation and aggression. They had caused long-lasting psychological harm to an already deeply damaged young girl and the court concluded that he was a dangerous man and a continuing risk to women.

The starting point for the section 20 offence on count one was fifty-four months in the judge’s view, placing this just above the top of the sentencing range. The judge reduced that to a term of forty-eight months giving credit for the plea. In addition the judge on count two found the starting point was forty months, again right at the top of the available range. That too was reduced to thirty-six months giving credit for the plea. Those sentences were ordered to be served consecutively. For the theft the sentence was ten months, again affording credit for the late plea but having regard to totality that sentence was ordered to run concurrently. Totality was considered by the judge in relation to the overall sentence.

The grounds of appeal, added to by oral argument and by supplementary written argument, submitted that the offences were incorrectly categorised, that the effects and consequences of the dissocial personality disorder from which Mr Crane undoubtedly suffered were not fully appreciated and that the sentence in totality was manifestly excessive. It was submitted that because there was material to suggest that Mr Crane had had mental health problems before the incident, and indeed had suffered from them since, the learned judge at the time of sentencing should have concluded that they bore on his culpability and responsibility for these offences. The Court of Appeal observed that this submission ran entirely contrary to the medical expert evidence available to the court. Mr Crane suffered from depression, anxiety and a personality disorder. He had a dissocial and unstable personality, which caused him to be a risk factor for impulsive or irrational outbursts of violence. However, as the author of the report commented, given that his violence appeared to be more significantly targeted towards women and intimate partners, there were pressing issues around his attitude and thinking towards women and the use of violence to control and dominate them in that context, which meant that he could not rely upon his mental ill-health, in so far as it was found to exist, to provide any explanation or excuse for the way in which he had behaved.

The Court of Appeal held that the calculation placing the section 20 offence just above the top of the sentencing range was one that the learned judge was perfectly entitled to reach given the facts of the offence and its surrounding circumstances. It would not have been wrong for the sentence on the theft to have been ordered to run consecutively. The judge did take that into account and ordered that it should run concurrently because he had specifically considered totality. The Court of Appeal rejected the submission that the sentence was manifestly excessive. For the totality of offending carried out by Mr Crane the sentence could not be said to be wrong in principle or manifestly excessive. In short, the total term of seven years’ imprisonment was richly deserved and the appeal was dismissed.