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Kidnap?
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Author:  captain cab [ Tue Dec 29, 2009 5:24 pm ]
Post subject:  Kidnap?
FIAZ UR REHMAN, R v. [1997] EWCA Crim 3104 (1st December, 1997)
No: 97/4365/Y2

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL

CRIMINAL DIVISION

Royal Courts of Justice
The Strand
London WC2

Monday 1st December 1997

B E F O R E :

LORD JUSTICE BUXTON

and

MR JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER

- - - - - - - - - - - -

R E G I N A

- v -

FIAZ UR REHMAN

MISS K BEX appeared on behalf of the Appellant

- - - - - - - - - - - -

JUDGMENT

( As approved by the Court )

Monday 1st December 1997

MR JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER: This appellant is 22 years old and is a man of previous good character. On 6th June 1997 he was convicted in the Crown Court at Peterborough before Judge Morrell of two offences of robbery. He appeals by leave of the single judge against concurrent sentences of four years' imprisonment.

The facts are these. At about 2.15 am on 17th November 1996 five young men left a nightclub in Peterborough. The appellant picked them up in his taxi . He asked for, and received, £10 in advance for the journey to Whittlesey, which is a few miles away from the city centre. In the course of the journey one of the group tried to turn on the heater. It would not work. The appellant stopped the taxi and found that switches were missing and that wires had been exposed. He was convinced that the damage had been done by one of the five in his taxi . He said, "I'm not having this, I'll make you pay" and he contacted somebody on his radio. He then turned the taxi round and headed back towards the city centre. When the taxi stopped at some traffic lights, three of the five youths got out and ran off. Two of them, Lodge and Unwin, both aged about 18, remained in the taxi . The appellant drove to the rear of a house, where a number of other taxi drivers were waiting.

Mr Lodge was punched and kicked by the appellant and his friends. He was forced to hand over a gold chain, a bracelet and a ring. He was then driven to a local branch of the TSB, where he was forced by the appellant to withdraw £40 and then left to make his own way home.

Meanwhile, Mr Unwin had been driven off in another taxi and taken to various cashpoints in unsuccessful attempts to withdraw cash. He was then driven back to the appellant and forced to hand over a gold neck chain, worth in the region of £150, before he too was allowed to go.

At the trial the appellant's defence was along the following lines. He had not threatened either man. He had not met any other taxi drivers . He intended to take the two men to the police station to report the damage to his heater. He denied taking either of them to withdraw money from cashpoints. They offered him jewellery as security for the damage which it was agreed would be exchanged for cash on a later date. The jury disbelieved this defence.

The learned judge had the advantage of forming his own view of the evidence as he had presided over the trial. He accepted that the appellant believed that the men had broken his heater, but he was not satisfied that in fact they had. In passing sentence he said that this was wicked behaviour committed when the appellant had lost his temper in a moment of folly. He observed that it was out of character. What he had done was, in effect, to kidnap the men and he so terrified them that, one of them at least, feared for his life. What he took from the men substantially exceeded the damage that he believed that they had done to his heater. Just as the courts were astute to protect taxi drivers from their fares, so fares must be protected from drivers .

There was, it seems to us, a degree of persistence about this robbery, which took place over a significant period of time. Furthermore, the appellant does not have the mitigation that would have been afforded to him by an early plea of guilty and which would, no doubt, have resulted in a very substantially shorter sentence.

The appeal today has been advanced forcefully and persuasively by Miss Bex; but in the end all the mitigation that has been put before us today was before the trial judge, with one exception, and that is a letter from Dr Barmanroy from the Westwood Clinic confirming the depressed and upset state that the appellant's wife has been in since before the trial.

This is a case in which there is strong mitigation. It can be summarised as follows. First, the appellant is a man of good character. Secondly, that he was only 21 at the time. Thirdly, that he has been married since the age of 17 and has two children, aged 4-and-a-half and 2, and that another child is expected soon. Fourthly, he was the sole breadwinner for the family and he had been in employment throughout the whole of the time since he left school. Fifthly, he had only recently bought a house, which is heavily mortgaged and, in the light of the prison sentence, presents serious practical problems for his family as far as maintaining repayments is concerned. Sixthly, the extended family have been devastated by the sentence. His younger brother is a medical student at Cambridge and the family are all hard-working decent people who have been shocked by Mr Rehman's conviction. Furthermore, the extensive local media coverage has brought considerable shame and stress on the wider family. Finally, the appellant's grandmother is in failing health and depended on him for a significant amount of care. It is unlikely that she will survive a sentence of this length.

Miss Bex has referred us to a number of authorities. Significantly, in this Court's view, each of those authorities concerned cases where the defendant in question had pleaded guilty. That is a significant difference from this case.

We have given anxious consideration to the sentence that the judge imposed. It was certainly a severe sentence, but in our judgment it was one that the judge was fully entitled to pass. Having presided over the trial, he was particularly well placed to assess the degree of criminality in this appellant's behaviour. It is plain that he did have in mind all the mitigating circumstances. However, we cannot, having considered all these matters, reach the conclusion that the sentence of four years' imprisonment was manifestly excessive. In these circumstances this appeal must be dismissed.
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