Benedetto v The Queen;
Labrador v The Queen [2003] UKPC 27
PC: Lord Bingham of Cornhill, Lord Steyn, Lord Hope of Craighead, Lord Hutton and Lord Rodger of Earlsferry: 7 April 2003
Where there were indications that the evidence of a cell confession allegedly made to a fellow prisoner might be tainted by an improper motive, the judge should draw the jury’s attention to those indications and their possible significance. He should then advise the jury to be cautious before accepting the prisoner’s evidence.
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council so held when allowing appeals by Alexander Benedetto and William Labrador from decisions of the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal (Sir Dennis Byron CJ, Satrohan Singh and Albert Redhead JJA) on 14 January 2002 to dismiss an appeal by Labrador against his convicting in the High Court of Justice of the British Virgin Islands on 10 May 2001 for the murder of Lois McMillen and to allow an appeal by the Crown against a ruling by the trial judge that there was no case for Benedetto to answer on the same murder charge.
At the trial, the prosecution case against Labrador had been crucially dependent on the evidence of a fellow prisoner, Jeffrey Plante, who had shared a cell with Labrador while the latter was on remand and who claimed that Labrador had confessed his guilt of murder. The Court of Appeal accepted that Plante was a confidence trickster, had numerous convictions for dishonesty, had been married ten times and had an interest to serve in giving evidence against Labrador and ruled that those facts required Plante’s evidence to be treated with extreme caution but that they were not enough to satisfy a submission of no case to answer: a jury, if properly directed, could properly come to the conclusion on Plante’s evidence that Labrador was guilty of the offence charged. As for Benedetto, the only substantive evidence against him for murder was also to be gleaned from Plante’s evidence, but the Court of Appeal ruled that the case against him should still have gone before the jury.
LORD HOPE OF CRAIGHEAD, giving the reserved judgment of the Board, said the evidence of a prison informer was inherently unreliable in view of the personal advantage which such witnesses thought they might obtain. They tended to have no interest whatsoever in the proper course of justice. The prisoner against whom that evidence was given was always at a disadvantage. He was afforded none of the usual protections against the inaccurate recording or invention of words used by him when interviewed by the police. And it might be difficult for him to obtain all the information which was needed to expose fully the informer’s bad character. In Pringle v The Queen [2003] UKPC 9 at [31] the Board had recognised that it was not possible to lay down any fixed rules about the directions which the judge should give to a jury about such evidence. However a judge must always be alert to the possibility that it was tainted by an improper motive, particularly where a prisoner who had yet to face trial gave evidence that the other prisoner had confessed to the very crime for which he was being held in custody. Where there were indications that the evidence of a cell confession might be tainted by an improper motive, the judge should draw the jury’s attention to those indications and their possible significance. He should then advise the jury to be cautious before accepting the prisoner’s evidence. It should be noted that there were two steps which the judge had to follow when undertaking this exercise, and that they were both equally important. The trial judge had failed to give adequate directions in Labrador’s case. Moreover, in the light of what was known about Plante, it would be wholly contrary to the interests of justice for Labrador to have to face a new trial based on his evidence. For the same reasons, the trial judge had been right to hold that it would not have been open to the jury to find Benedetto guilty of the murder on Plante’s evidence, and that there was therefore no case for him to answer.
Appearances: Edward Fitzgerald QC, Paul Bowen and Hayden St Clair-Douglas (of the British Virgin Islands Bar) (Simons Muirhead & Burton) for Labrador; John Perry QC (Myers Fletcher & Gordon) for Benedetto; James Dingemans QC, Terrence F Williams, Principal Crown Counsel and David A Abednego, Crown Counsel (both of the British Virgin Islands Bar) (Charles Russell) for the Crown.
Reported by: Paul Magrath, barrister.
To Benedetto & Labrador v The Queen, [2003]
To Benedetto & Labrador, costs judgment
To Pringle v The Queen “cell confession” judgment
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