Client charged with S.18 GBH avoids prison

Case study summary

Our client was charged with affray, S18 wounding, and possession of a bladed article. The Crown Prosecution Service accepted a lesser plea of a public order offence as an alternative to affray, and offered no evidence to wounding with intent and possession of a bladed article.

Case study

A fight broke out in a pub and a man was stabbed with a knife. CCTV footage showed our client enter the pub and later become involved in a fight. Eye witnesses provided statements stating that our client pulled out a knife and stabbed the victim before fleeing the scene. He was later arrested in a car park, and a knife was recovered by the police.

Despite CCTV footage of the fight, eyewitness testimony and recovery of a knife, the CPS was unable to provide forensic evidence linking our client to the knife or the victim. The eye witnesses were mostly all related to the victim.

The defence case was that our client was the victim of a verbal racist attack. This escalated into a fight involving multiple people, where our client disarmed someone brandishing what he perceived to be a cosh, rather than a knife. He then broke free and ran out of the pub.

It was alleged that he had gone to the pub in possession of a weapon with the intent to wound, stabbed the victim, and left with the knife still in his possession before discarding it in the carpark where he was arrested.

Despite witness evidence, and CCTV footage of the public order offence, there was no forensic evidence connecting the recovered knife to the victim of the stabbing or our client.

Mary Monson Solicitors challenged the forensic evidence and the interpretation of the CCTV footage, and requested police records of the other individuals involved in the fight. Accordingly, those witnesses chose not to attend court to give evidence, and the CPS agreed to accept a lesser charge than affray and dropped the more serious charges.

This was an excellent result for our client who has a significant criminal record for violence. Ultimately he was sentenced to 8 weeks imprisonment suspended for 12 months, when he was originally looking at a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if convicted after a trial.