R v Seager; Blatch [2009] EWCA Crim 1303; [2009] WLR (D) 215; The Times, July 16th 2009.
The Court of Appeal (Aikens LJ, Hedley,Hickinbottom JJ) applied the dicta of the House of Lords in the case of R v May [2008] UKHL 28; [2008] 1 AC 1028 (decided after these confiscations orders were obtained), that for the purposes of s 71 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, it was necessary that the defendant himself obtained property as a result of his offending, even if jointly or through a third party at his behest, and his benefit was the value of that property. Overturning the decision in R v Neuberg (unreported) that turnover equalled the defendant’s benefit and following May, they held that just because a person had power of disposition or control over property did not mean that he owned it.
There was nothing to suggest that any different approach to confiscation issues was to be taken in relation to defendants whose criminal conduct consisted of contravening directors disqualification orders or undertakings, or that the basis on which the corporate veil could be pierced when examining what benefit the defendant gained, was any different in such cases. A Court could only pierce the corporate veil if an offender attempted to shelter behind a corporate facade to hide his crime and benefits from it, if he did acts in the name of a company which constituted a criminal offence which led to the offenders’ conviction, or if the transaction or business structures constituted an attempt to disguise the true nature of the transaction or structure so as to deceive third parties or the courts.
(Alex Munro)

Al-Khawaja v. United Kingdom; Tahery v. United Kingdom, unreported, 20th January 2009
The European Court of Human Rights held that there was no general rule that untested statements (such as those of absent or anonymous witnesses) could be admitted consistently with Article 6(1) and Article 6(3)(d) of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right of a defendant to have any witnesses against him examined) where they were the sole or decisive evidence against a defendant, and it was doubtful whether any counter-balancing factors would be sufficient to justify the admission of such statements.

R. v. Saw; R. v. Tete-Djawu; R. v. Smith (Martin); R. v. Kassa; R. v. Younis; R. v. McPhee, The Times, 26th January 2009, [2009] EWCA Crim. 1
The Court of Appeal (Lord Judge C.J., Latham and Hughes L.JJ.) re-examined R. v. McInerney; R. v. Keating and issued detailed new guidance on sentencing for domestic burglary, saying that all but the lowest level burglaries (those with minimal loss and damage and without raised culpability or impact) should normally attract a custodial sentence, which should generally be in the range of 9 to 18 months if any aggravating factors are present and 18 months to 4 years if there is seriously raised culpability or serious impact.

R. v. Allpress; R. v. Symeou; R. v. Casal; R. v. Morris; R. v. Martin, unreported, 20th January 2009, [2009] EWCA Crim. 8
The Court of Appeal (Latham, Hughes and Toulson L.JJ., Rafferty and Maddison J.) confirmed that the judgment of the House of Lords in R. v. May applied to the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, and accordingly ruled that a mere courier or custodian of criminal property does not “obtain” the property which he is delivering or minding for the purposes of that Act.

R. v. G.; R. v. J. [2009] 2 W.L.R. 724, [2009] UKHL 13
The House of Lords (Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, Lady Hale of Richmond, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood and Lord Mance) issued guidance on the offences under sections 57 (possession of articles for terrorist purposes) and 58 (collection of information useful to a terrorist) of the Terrorism Act 2000. In respect of the latter, their Lordships held, in particular, that Parliament cannot have intended to criminalise the possession of information of a kind which is useful to people for all sorts of everyday purposes and which many members of the public regularly obtain or use, simply because that information could also be useful to someone who was preparing an act of terrorism.

R. v. May [2008] 2 W.L.R. 1131, [2008] UKHL 28
The House of Lords laid out some general principles concerning confiscation. Amongst other things, it said that a defendant ordinarily obtains property if in law he owns it, whether alone or jointly, which will ordinarily connote a power of disposition or control, as where a person directs a payment or conveyance of property to someone else. Mere couriers or custodians or other very minor contributors to an offence, rewarded by a specific fee and having no interest in the property or the proceeds of sale, are unlikely to be found to have obtained that property; although it may be otherwise with money launderers.

R. v. Rahman and others [2008] 3 W.L.R. 264, [2008] UKHL 45
The defendants were part of a group which violently attacked the victim and fatally stabbed him. They were convicted of murder as secondary parties, but argued that they had intended only to cause at the most grievous bodily harm, and had not foreseen the possibility of a member of their group killing with the intention to kill. However, the House of Lords held that that intention was irrelevant both to whether the killing was within the scope of the common purpose to which they were accessories and to whether the killer’s act was fundamentally different from the act/acts which they foresaw as part of the joint enterprise.

R. v. Kenning, Blackshaw and Fenwick, The Times, July 10, 2008, [2008] EWCA Crim. 1534
The defendants sold equipment which could be used for the cultivation of cannabis plants, but which could also be used to grow plants legally, and there was no evidence that any of their customers had in fact used the equipment illegally. They were charged with and convicted of conspiring to aid and abet the production of cannabis. The Court of Appeal, quashing their convictions, held that an agreement to aid and abet an offence is not in law capable of constituting a criminal conspiracy under section 1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977.

R. v. Devonald, 72 J.C.L. 280, [2008] EWCA Crim. 527
After the defendant’s 16-year-old daughter and the 16-year-old complainant’s relationship ended, the defendant pretended on the internet to be a 20-year-old girl in order to teach the complainant a lesson and deliberately to embarrass him. The defendant persuaded the complainant to masturbate twice over a webcam. The Court of Appeal, upholding the defendant’s conviction for causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, held that it was open to the jury to conclude that the complainant was deceived as to the purpose of the act of masturbation, and that the conclusive presumption as to lack of consent under section 76 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 therefore applied.

(Peter Fitzgerald October 2008)