Francis FitzGibbon

Until​ the Supreme Court gave its landmark judgment in R. v. Jogee on 18 February, it was possible for someone to be convicted of a crime which they did not personally commit or intend to commit, under the common law doctrine of joint enterprise. If they were involved with an accomplice in one offence, and they foresaw that the accomplice might go on intentionally to commit another, they...

If​ Britain votes to leave the EU it will take several years to disentangle what’s to be kept and what discarded from our EU-saturated legislation. The law of the European Union has left few areas of life in the UK wholly untouched even though the EU can only legislate in areas for which it derives what are known as ‘competences’ from the treaties member states have...

After Brexit​, the public face of criminal justice will look much the same as it does now. The UK has resisted many of the European Union’s moves towards harmonisation of substantive criminal law and procedure, and it is unlikely to use its new-found freedom from the restraints of EU law to decriminalise things like child pornography, cybercrime and people trafficking. The EU’s...

If you want​ to appeal against a guilty verdict given by a crown court jury you first have to seek permission from the Court of Appeal. For permission to be granted, a judge has to be satisfied there is an ‘arguable case’ that the conviction was ‘unsafe’. If so, the appeal is heard in full by a panel of three judges. The latest figures show that in 2016-17 the court...

Thomas Grant’s​ Court Number One tells the stories of 11 prominent trials heard in Court One of the Old Bailey between 1907, when it opened, and 2003. His aim is to use these stories as illustrations of ‘British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years … Through the criminal trials … there can be traced at least one version of the history of...