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Royal Courts of Justice

The Strand

London WC2

Tuesday 24th February 1998

B E F O R E :

LORD JUSTICE BUXTON

MR JUSTICE ROUGIER

and

THE COMMON SERJEANT

HIS HONOUR JUDGE DENISON QC

( acting as a judge of the CACD )

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R E G I N A

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REGINALD DAVIS

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Computer Aided Transcript of the Stenograph Notes of

Smith Bernal Reporting Limited

180 Fleet Street, London EC4A 2HD

Tel No: 0171 421 4040 Fax No: 0171 831 8838

(Official Shorthand Writers to the Court)

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MR R MENON appeared on behalf of the Appellant

MISS E DEACON appeared on behalf of the Crown

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JUDGMENT

( As Approved by the Court )

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Crown Copyright

Tuesday 24th February 1998

JUDGMENT

LORD JUSTICE BUXTON: This is an appeal from a decision of the Crown Court at Knightsbridge, before his Honour judge Samuels QC and a jury, in which the appellant, Mr Reginald Davis, was convicted of an offence of possession of a bladed article under section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.

The matter proceeded in the following way. The judge took the view that it was for him to decide, as a matter of the construction of the statute, whether the article that was before the court was in fact a bladed article such as fell in the ambit of the section, and he having decided that it was, that question should not be considered by the jury, being a matter of law not of fact. It was for the jury to decide, having been directed by the judge, whether it was in fact the case that under section 139(4) Mr Davis had a good reason or lawful authority for having the article with him. By their verdict they decided that he had not.

The article in question was a screwdriver. We have not seen it, but we are assured that it is correctly described in the ruling of the learned judge, which is to be found at page 4B of volume two of the transcripts before us. The judge said:

"It is common ground that this screwdriver is not sharply pointed, indeed no normal screwdriver would be suitable for its usual function, if it were.

However, in normal language and without straining the use of language, a standard screwdriver, has one or more blades usually angled and in positioned on each side of the driving head, which constitute a narrow and flattened ridge at the tip of the blade or blades. As such it is capable of causing injury to a third party if used offensively.

In my judgment any screwdriver and in particular the screwdriver which has been produced to me in this case, does constitute a bladed article to which section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act, as amended, applies."

So the judge's ruling was that the screwdriver, because it had what he described as "blades positioned on each side of the driving head" was a bladed article for the purpose of section 139.

Section 139 reads as follows, subject to the subsections dealing with good reason or lawful authority:

"(1) .....any person who has an article to which this section applies with him in a public place shall be guilty of an offence.

(2) Subject to subsection (3) below, this section applies to any article which has a blade or is sharply pointed except a folding pocketknife.

(3) This section applies to a folding pocketknife if the cutting each of you tell us blade exceeds 3 inches."

In her valiant submissions to us this morning on behalf of the respondent, Miss Deacon has argued that the mischief of this section is to deter the carrying of objects that could be used to cause injury or be used in subsequent criminal offences. If a person has such an object, the burden then passes to him under section 139 to establish good reason or lawful authority for having such an article. She argues, therefore, that the judge was right to say that the case fell within the mischief of the section, having concluded that the screwdriver could be used to cause injury to the person, to hold that a screwdriver, because it could be said to have a blade, fell within the terms of this section.

We cannot agree with that approach. We should say first, however, that in our judgement the judge was right to hold that it was for him to decide whether the screwdriver fell within the expression "any article which has a blade" in section 139(2). Mr Menon, for the appellant, had we called on him, would have wished to contest that proposition. However, in our judgement this is not a question of the interpretation of an ordinary English word in the terms adopted in the judgment of Lord Reid in the case of Brutus v. Cozens . It falls rather within the second category there recognised by Lord Reid, that is to say the construction of the terms of the statute. It necessarily follows that this must be a question of construction, in the terms in which the argument has been developed before us, because the issue here is not the simple etymological meaning of the word "blade", but whether this article, it being accepted at least for the purposes of this argument that it does have a blade, is the type of article with a blade that is intended to fall within the terms of section 139(2). That is a question of the construction of section 139, not a question of the meaning of the word "blade". To that extent, therefore, the judge was right in taking this burden upon himself.

We are, however, quite unable to agree with the conclusion to which he came. Firstly, we take up the argument advanced by Miss Deacon which also, so far as we can see, lies behind the judge's ruling. It is too simple to say that the mischief of this section is to deter the carrying of items that could cause injury. Preventing or deterring further offences in which injuries are caused is, we entirely accept, no doubt the long-term and perfectly understandable objective of Parliament in passing sections such as section 139. Such an objective was also behind the Prevention of Crime Act 1953 which, however, limited itself to objects made or intended for the purpose of causing injury. The contention here goes much wider: that any object that could be so used potentially falls within the section.

The objections to that are twofold. Firstly, it gives the section an extremely wide ambit. As soon as an object falls within this section and a citizen is found with it in his possession in public, he has to prove that he has a good excuse for having it. That is a very significant limitation on the citizen's freedom. It should not be assumed that it has been achieved except by the use of clear words.

Second, the degree to which Parliament thought it proper to interfere with the citizen's freedom in that way is demonstrated by the limitation in the section to articles, in section 139(2), which have a blade or are sharply pointed, except folding pocketknives. The common sense assumption that lies behind that section is that Parliament sought to prevent or deter the carrying of what might be broadly called sharp instruments in public, not any article that has a blade - even if a screwdriver can be so described - but an article with a blade that falls within the same broad category as a knife or a sharply pointed instrument. That follows not only as a matter of common sense, but by looking at the specific items that are mentioned in the section, that is to say sharply pointed instruments or folding pocketknives, and inferring from that what the nature of the bladed article is to which Parliament was referring.

It seems to us, in that comparison, that it would be quite unlikely, indeed in our view impossible, that Parliament intended an article such as a screwdriver, just because it has a blade, to fall into the same category as a sharply pointed item or a folding pocketknife.

Further, that that is the construction of the phrase "any article which has a blade" is strongly reinforced by referring to section 139(3), which we have already read. The section applies to a folding pocketknife if the cutting edge of its blade exceeds three inches. That section, in its very language, seems to assume that references to blades entail references to a cutting edge. That is how the expression is used in section 139(3). It is also, as we have said, the way in which the other items in section 139(2) seem to be described.

In our judgement, the test cannot be, as the judge suggested, whether the article is capable of causing injury. If that were the test there would be no need and no justification to do what Parliament has specifically done, and limit the section to bladed items and sharp instruments. If the objective was to outlaw the carrying of all items capable of causing injury there would be no explanation at all for why there was a limitation to articles which happen to have something that could be described as a blade.

For all those reasons, which at the end of the day come down to a matter of common sense, we consider that the judge's ruling on this matter was not correct and that therefore the conviction was incorrectly entered and should be quashed.

There is no question of ordering a retrial in this case.

This appeal is therefore allowed to that extent.