The cases analysed in this thesis are the whole population of available murder and rape appeals against conviction decided between January 2006 and December 2010. This is a sample of the total workload of the Court of Appeal. Each case was downloaded and read alongside a template. The template was designed to allow as many features of the case to be identified with a Yes / No answer, or for qualitative data to be coded into dichotomous items labelled as 0 and 1 for the purposes of subsequent analysis. This template is reproduced and discussed in Chapter 6. The variables were extracted from each case by marking appropriately the sections on the template. Once a case was read it was immediately coded into SPSS (IBM SPSS Statistics, v. 24 2016, IMB Inc.). Only cases where an appellant was appealing a murder and / or rape conviction were included in the study. The precise parameters of the scope of ‘murder’ and ‘rape’ needs some attention, this is discussed below.
There were 472 full appeals against conviction included in the final dataset, 241 murder appeals, and 231 rape appeals. The offences of murder and rape were chosen for specific reasons. It would have been possible to follow previous studies and read the first 300 judgments from one year, or all cases from one year, or a random sample of cases, or all cases from a number of years. The latter option was excluded as the numbers involved would quickly become unmanageable for this study. The decision was made to focus on specific offences in order to explore decision-making in those offences. Since previous studies have already provided sufficient detail on the general decision-making of the Court of Appeal, it was decided that it focussing only on certain offences would offer new insights into the decision-making of the Court. This means that there is no attempt in this thesis to generalise the findings to other offences decided in the Court of Appeal. This provides opportunities for further replicative research on different offences.
The specific offences of murder and rape were carefully chosen. They are amongst the most serious offences known to the law, and they are both
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indictable-only offences. This is important because it means that any murder and rape convictions which are appealed can only be appealed to the Court of Appeal. Offences which are tried in the Magistrates’ Courts are appealable to the Crown Court.718 By focusing on indictable-only offences it is possible to be sure that all
murder and rape convictions appealed will be included in the sample.
Attempted murder and attempted rape were not included in the sample. This is because these are separate offences to completed murder and rape, and the intention was to keep the offences under analysis as homogenous as possible. Further, applications for permission to appeal were omitted from the sample. There are several reasons for this. The primary reason is that the outcome of appeals and applications for permission is different. In full appeals against conviction, the outcome is that the conviction is quashed or upheld, while in applications for leave to appeal the outcome is that the grounds of appeal are / are not reasonably arguable. When permission is refused this is equivalent to dismissing the appeal, but when permission is granted there is still a long way to go before the conviction is quashed. This meant it was difficult to subsume the applications for leave within the full appeals’ dataset. As the dataset was already sufficiently large it was decided the problem could be avoided by simply omitting to include applications for leave to appeal in the sample.
It should also be noted that applications for permission to appeal are treated very differently; it is not comparing like with like. Often applicants will be unrepresented, and it frequently appears that renewed applications are add-ons in appeals against sentences. It is also much more difficult to extract data from renewed applications; transcripts are rarely longer than 4 or 5 pages. Finally, applications were excluded because it appears that most renewed applications are not available on the legal databases. This then raises the question of why some are available and some are not, potentially leading to biased data.
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As was explained in Chapter 4, age categories of complainants / the deceased have been mapped onto the Sexual Offences Act 2003. This is with the addition of a further category which is absent from the 2003 Act – the 16 – 17 age group. This is included as a separate group in order to separate adult complainants /
deceased from those aged 16 and 17. As the sample size for the 16 – 17 age
group is relatively small, it should not have a large impact on any further analysis. Table 5.1 shows the age profile of the complainants / deceased in the sample.
Table 5.1: Age profile of complainants / deceased in sample.
Murder Rape Under 13 11 97 13 – under 16 4 29 16 – 17 15 19 18+ 211 85
As will be discussed further in Chapter 6, relatively few deceased in murder appeals were children, whilst the majority of rape complainants were children. The effect of this is that the variables for age is more relevant to rape than murder. The following Table shows the cases in the sample categorised by gender.
Table 5.2: Appeals in sample by gender.
Murder Rape
Male 171 70
Female 19 212
As can be seen, there is a similar effect in murder appeals, in that one group is more common to one offence than the other offence. Namely, in the murder appeals, there are relatively few female deceased. The effect of this is that the variable which considers the association between the gender of the complainant / deceased and the outcome of appeals is more relevant to rape appeals as there is greater variation.
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