Mark Gary Coates v Janice Elizabeth Turner & Anor

This is an appeal by Mark Gary Coates from the committal order made by Her Honour Judge Venn on 26 October 2023, by which he was sentenced to a term of committal amounting to 252 days in prison. The sentence was passed after the judge had found Mr Coates to be in contempt of court as a result of seven breaches of an order made on 20 September 2022.

At the hearing before the judge, Mr Coates represented himself. Before us, he is represented by Mr Colville. The Respondents, Ms Turner and Mr Greenwood, have been represented at both hearings by Ms Anslow. We are grateful to counsel for their assistance, which has made our task much easier than the judge’s was.

The committal proceedings arise out of a civil claim involving Mr Coates and his wife, the occupants of No 9 Eatenden Lane, Robertsbridge, and the Respondents, who live at No 10 Eatenden Lane. A dispute concerning the boundary between the properties was determined by the judge on 20 September 2022 after a 5-day trial. The Respondents, who were the Claimants, succeeded and the judge made a series of orders in their favour. These included damages amounting to £260,000, costs on an indemnity basis and a series of orders under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. For our purposes, the relevant ones are:

Mr and Mrs Coates sought permission to appeal, which was refused twice by Meade J: on paper on 12 January 2023 and again at an oral hearing on 27 February 2023. They then applied for the decision to be reopened: this was refused by Miles J on 19 April 2023. A further attempt to take their case to this court was refused by Asplin LJ on 11 October 2023.

On 10 May 2023, the Respondents made a contempt application, alleging that Mr and Mrs Coates had breached the orders recited above in 24 respects. The Respondents subsequently indicated that they did not wish to pursue the application against Mrs Coates.

The matter was listed for hearing on 7 July 2023, but was adjourned before that date due to judicial unavailability. It was relisted for 10 August, but was again adjourned to 22 September as Mr Coates had only obtained legal aid on 31 July. That hearing was then adjourned by another judge until 26 October because of apparent difficulty in finding counsel for Mr Coates. On that occasion he was directed to file any evidence he intended to rely on by 19 October. On 24 October, two days before the hearing, the solicitors applied to come off the record for lack of counsel.

At the outset of the hearing on 26 October 2023, Mr Coates applied for the judge to recuse herself. She rightly refused and there is no appeal from that decision. He then applied for a further adjournment to allow him time to seek legal representation. The judge refused that application on the basis that the proceedings had been on foot since May and a fair opportunity to obtain representation had already been given. Again, there is no appeal from that decision.

At the hearing, the Respondents relied upon a number of affidavits. Mr Coates had signed two witness statements on 2 September 2023. They ran to 75 pages including many exhibits. Ms Turner gave lengthy evidence under cross-examination by Mr Coates; he chose not to give evidence and relied upon his witness statements, and he made closing submissions.

The judge found that that the Respondents had proved beyond a reasonable doubt seven allegations of breach of the injunction by Mr Coates. These were that he had failed to remove various objects (Allegations 1 & 2); that he had threatened and filmed Ms Turner (Allegations 7 and 8); that had threatened the Respondents during the hearing before Meade J on 27 February 2023 (Allegation 9); that he had thrown stones over the fence (Allegation 11); and that he still had cameras trained on the Respondents’ land (Allegation 12).

Having heard mitigation, the judge referred to this Court’s recent guidance on sentencing for contempt of court in Lovett v Wigan Borough Council [2022] EWCA Civ 1631 (at paragraphs 31-57). She also referred to the Civil Justice Council’s report, produced in July 2020 and approved in Lovett, entitled ‘Anti-Social Behaviour and the Civil Courts’. She considered the breaches to merit the following sentences of imprisonment:

On 15 November 2023, Mr Coates appealed. He seeks the quashing of the contempt finding, alternatively a lesser sentence leading to his release. His grounds of appeal, expanded without opposition from the Respondents, are these:

I will first consider Grounds 4 and 5.

On Ground 4, Mr Colville argues that a defendant has the right to remain silent and cannot be compelled to give evidence in a contempt application – see CPR r.81.7(3) and r.81.4(2)(n). As Mr Coates appeared as a litigant in person and chose not to give evidence, the witness statements prepared earlier ought to have been excluded from the proceedings. The judge erred by failing to do so, and by taking those statements into account.

We have considered Comet Products v Hawkex Plastics [1971] 2 QB 67, Arlidge, Eady & Smith on Contempt, 5th ed. at para. 15-55, and In re B (Contempt of Court: Affidavit Evidence) [1996] 1 WLR 627, where Wall J held at 638A-D that the court does have the power to direct a respondent to committal proceedings to file and serve any affidavits or statements on which they might wish to rely. However, at 638E-G, he went on to say this about the respondent who does not wish to deploy the evidence thus filed:

We heard interesting submissions about the correct interpretation of what had happened in the present case. At the beginning of the hearing, the judge carefully warned Mr Coates that he did not have to give evidence and that he was at liberty to withdraw his statements if he wished. Mr Coates then cross-examined Ms Turner extensively with frequent reference to exhibits to those statements. However, when it came to the point where Mr Coates might have given evidence himself, he declined to do so, but insisted that he relied upon the contents of his statements. Before us, the parties were not agreed as to whether this was a proper course. Mr Colville submitted that the contents of the statements did not become evidence as they had not been verified from the witness box. Ms Anslow submitted that by virtue of their use in cross-examination and the express reliance placed upon them by Mr Coates, they became evidence that had been ‘deployed’ in the manner envisaged in Re B.

We mention this issue because it may arise in future, though not, we suspect, very often. Where it does, the court will need to take care to ensure that findings of contempt are only based upon evidence that can properly be relied upon. However, it is unnecessary to say more on this appeal, because the judge did not in fact place any significant reliance on anything that appeared in Mr Coates's statements. She referred to him as having made an admission in relation to the first and second breaches only, which related to the presence of objects on the land. Those breaches were proved beyond doubt by the evidence of Ms Turner and by photographs. Nothing that Mr Coates said was necessary to those findings. There was nothing remotely approaching a serious procedural error leading to injustice. This ground fails.

Ground 5 arises from the permission hearing before Meade J. In the course of lengthy submissions Mr Coates said this:

The judge found:

It is said on behalf of Mr Coates that these were not a threat to the Respondents nor, if they were, could they be treated as being of very high culpability. For the Respondents it is said that this is a finding of fact with which this Court should be slow to interfere. The principles set out in Volpi v Volpi [2022] EWCA Civ 464 are relied upon in support of the contention that it cannot be said that the judge’s conclusion was not rationally supportable.

I have underlined the only part of paragraph 16 that might be directly relevant:

I acknowledge the feel that the judge had for this case. However, even if the order was wide enough to cover remarks made in a courtroom, it is in my view stretching the effect of the injunction too far to treat this as a separate breach of the order. It was certainly yet another clear manifestation of Mr Coates’s disobedient and unapologetic attitude, which is understandably distressing to the Respondents, but the words themselves are not unambiguous and the context in which they were spoken was unusual. Without further explanation, it is not possible to see how the judge came to make this finding to the criminal standard. The words, preceded as they were with the statement “I am not going to walk away from my property”, did not expressly threaten an attack on the Respondents or their property, and might equally also be read as indicating a threat to resist, possibly with force, an attempt to evict Mr Coates and his family. I therefore do not consider that the finding as it stands can be rationally supported. If that is wrong, I nevertheless consider that it was a clear error to treat this statement as if it was by some distance the most serious of the breaches, attracting a starting point of 24 weeks imprisonment. I doubt if any custodial sentence was warranted for conduct of that kind, but if it was it would have been at a low level.

Ground 3 asserts that the judge should have passed a suspended sentence. I would accept that some judges might have done so in the hope that compliance could be achieved. However, in this case Mr Coates showed no appetite for compliance and I do not consider that the judge can be criticised for passing an immediate custodial sentence.

Centrally, Mr Colville argues under Ground 1 that the sentence was manifestly excessive as:

In my view, these arguments hold little attraction. The fact that Mr Coates was unrepresented is not a factor bearing on sentence. He did not have undue difficulty in representing himself (his cross-examination of Ms Turner runs to 50 pages). The fact that he has been ordered to pay (but has not paid) damages and costs is entirely his own fault, and is a separate matter from the contempt with which the judge was dealing. His personal circumstances were known to the judge, but more particularly they were known to him when he embarked on his contemptuous behaviour. Finally, we have seen or heard nothing to suggest that Mr Coates has altered his attitude. So I am not impressed by the particular arguments in mitigation.

Far more persuasive is the broad submission that the sentence imposed was excessive.

In Lovett v Wigan Borough Council (above) this court gave guidance about sentencing for contempt of court. It noted that the five options available on sentencing are:

Here, the judge assessed the breaches in the following way:

Mr Colville argues that each breach should have counted as falling within C2 of the table – minor breaches with medium culpability – so attracting a starting point of adjournment and with a range of up to one month. The Respondents reply that the judge considered all these matters carefully and reached a proper sentence.

The CJC guidelines are not a straight-jacket and judges have a considerable discretion as to how they should categorise breaches. Even so, I agree that it is not possible to categorise three of these breaches falling within Culpability category A (high, very serious). If they were a contempt at all, the words said by the Mr Coates to Meade J at the permission hearing cannot be considered to have been a ‘very serious breach’, when compared with breaches that unfortunately regularly come before the court. The other breaches might at the highest be regarded as falling in category B. The upshot is that the starting point for sentencing for those individual breaches would be one month, with a range of adjournment to 3 months.

At paragraph 39 of Lovett the objectives in sentencing for civil contempt are described as being “(in this order): (i) Ensuring future compliance; (ii) Punishment; and (iii) Rehabilitation.” I agree with the judge when she said that Mr Coates’s refusal to accept the order and the repetition of breaches were aggravating features. Even so, looking at the matter overall an immediate custodial term of 252 days (about 8 months) was markedly outside the range of proportionate disposals for a first term of committal for breaches of this nature. Even without Allegation 9, the term comes to 151 days, or about 5 months.

Finally, Ground 2 concerns the question of whether the judge should have passed consecutive as opposed to concurrent sentences. This is not a straightforward matter, and is clearly linked to the questions of proportionality and totality. Lovett makes clear at [43] that it is good practice to consider a penalty for each breach found proved, and that terms of imprisonment may be concurrent or consecutive to each other. In the present case, the judge added up all the breaches and then applied a 40% discount, with no explanation for the amount of the discount beyond the fact that it led to what she considered to be the least possible sentence. Mr Colville submits that she did not sufficiently consider passing a concurrent sentence in a case where all the breaches were different facets of the same dispute. He accepts that the judge had a discretion and argues that in a case of this complexion she was bound to explain why she was making the sentences consecutive. Ms Anslow points out that the judge directed herself by reference to Lovett. Her judgement was alive to the totality principle. This is reflected in the fact that she reduced the total sentence by 40%, thereby rendering the sentence proportionate to the overall conduct.

When a term of committal is unavoidable, there are different routes by which an appropriate level of sentence can be identified. Had the judge categorised the individual sentences in a way that was more closely aligned with the CJC guidelines, her approach of aggregating the terms and then applying a proportionality (totality) cross-check could not have been criticised. She might also have decided to make some terms concurrent (for example, by grouping together breaches involving a failure to move objects, and doing the same for breaches of harassment). But if the starting points are too high, the process of addition that consecutive sentencing entails carries a risk of an excessive total sentence: see Lovett at [43]. This case illustrates that this may be so, even if a discount is then applied. The alternative for the judge was to have sentenced by reference to the overall course of conduct with which she was faced. The breaches all arose from the same order and were largely directed at the Respondents alone. Whichever route the judge chose, this was in my view a case in which a decision to sentence to consecutive terms required explanation.

In conclusion, I would uphold the judge’s careful findings of contempt, except with regard to Allegation 9. Looked at in the round, these were contemptuous breaches of a clear court order and they could not be ignored. As to sentence, I reject the argument that an immediate custodial sentence was necessarily wrong in principle. However, I would allow the appeal on the basis that the overall sentence was manifestly excessive. In all the circumstances, a sentence of about 3 months imprisonment could not have been the subject of a successful appeal. In fact, Mr Coates has now served 47 days imprisonment. That is the equivalent of a sentence of 94 days, which is approximately three months. I would therefore substitute a sentence that allows for Mr Coates’s immediate release.

Although the appeal succeeds to that extent, it need hardly be said that any breaches of the judge’s orders in the future would be likely to lead to a substantial term of committal. The listing of any future applications would of course be a matter for the court, but for my part I see no reason why they should not continue to be heard by HHJ Venn.

I agree.

I also agree.