Meeking, R. v

LORD JUSTICE TOULSON: On 2nd November 2011 before the Recorder of Bristol, the appellant was convicted of the manslaughter of her husband, Alan Meeking. It was a tragic and most unusual case. The appellant was a woman in her mid-forties and of good character. She and the deceased had been together for nine years.

On 30th August 2010 they went out together in her Ford Escort to West Bay. They had a fair bit to drink. They were driving back at about 10.20 in the evening along the A3088. They had a row. He was driving at about 60 mph. During the row, suddenly and without warning she pulled on the handbrake. The appellant said later that it was done spontaneously to make him stop.

The effect of her action was to lock the rear wheels and cause the car to spin across the road into a head-on collision with an on-coming Rover. Her husband died of multiple injuries at the scene. The appellant was immediately mortified. Those who came on the scene described her as hysterical. She kept repeating that it was her fault, which was true. She said that they were having an argument, he said he did not want her and she pulled on the handbrake.

She was charged with manslaughter. The way that the prosecution put the case was that it was an unlawful act manslaughter. The unlawful act alleged was endangering road users contrary to section 22(A)(1)(b) of the Road Traffic Act 1988 as amended. That section provides as follows:

Counsel for the appellant submitted that the section covered various forms of conduct creating a danger in advance of the motoring itself. Subsection (a) and (c) covered cases where a person made the road unsafe or interfered with road signs. Subsection (1)(b), she submitted, covered a person who interfered with a vehicle before it was driven. Counsel for the prosecution submitted that there was nothing in the language of subsection (1)(b) which limited the words in that way. "Interference with a motor vehicle" was an expression to be given its ordinary meaning. To apply those words to the conduct of the appellant involved no straining of their ordinary meaning. The judge agreed. Having heard both sides of the argument he ruled that pulling on the handbrake while the car was being driven could fall within the meaning of "interferes with a motor vehicle" and there was no ambiguity which made it legitimate to look at Hansard.

The appellant appeals against her conviction with leave of the single judge on the ground that the judge erred in his interpretation of the statute. The argument attractively presented by Miss Bradberry really had three strands to it. One was that the conduct must have occurred prior to the driving. The second was that the conduct must be external to the vehicle. The third was that the conduct, fairly viewed, must amount to something which changed the state of the vehicle so that physically it was in a different condition afterwards, rather than conduct which interfered with the manner in which it was driven.

We have had the advantage which the Recorder did not have of being able to trace the origin of the section. A footnote in Halsbury's Statutes provides the information that the section was inserted by section 6 of the Road Traffic Act 1991 and was intended to give effect to the policy of the government set out in a White Paper "The Road User and the Law", Command 576, February 1989. Paragraph 3.2 and 3.3 of the White Paper read as follows:

The words in paragraph 3.2 that the offence was designed to catch a person who "interferes with any conveyance intended for use on the road" are relied on by Miss Bradberry as supporting her interpretation of the statute, that it should be confined to conduct which occurred before the vehicle was used.

The description of the purpose in the White Paper is brief and for a fuller understanding it is necessary to look at the Criminal Law Revision Committee's Report to which the White Paper referred. The Criminal Law Revision Committee considered in its report the offences created by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which it recommended should be replaced by modern legislation. In Appendix B to the report, the Committee referred to certain railway offences created by sections 32 to 34 of the 1861 Act. Those sections are still in force. Section 32 provides:

The Committee went on to comment as follows:

That provides the background to the enactment of what is now section 22A(1) of the 1988 Act. That section brings behaviour broadly comparable to that set out in sections 32 and 33, in relation to road traffic, into a single section but with the modification proposed by the committee that there is no requirement of a positive intent to endanger life. It is sufficient that the conduct is deliberate and carried out in circumstances where it would be obvious to any reasonable person that to do so would be dangerous. In other words, it creates an offence of negligence, but one which requires the act itself to have been deliberate and of a kind which would be obviously dangerous to any reasonable person.

There would be an anomaly and a lacuna if the new section covered a person who put an obstacle on the road but did not cover a person who dropped an object from a bridge on to a passing car. We see no reason for reading a limitation into section 22A(1)(b) confining it to acts done to the vehicle before it is driven, when the section itself contains no such limitation and its insertion would create an obvious anomaly. There is no discernible policy reason why Parliament should have wanted to criminalise interference with a car creating a danger before it is driven, but not interference creating a danger while it is in the process of being driven. We are therefore unable to accept the appellant's first submission. Nor are we persuaded by the argument that the conduct has to be in some way external to the vehicle itself, such as dropping objects onto it. If a bomber carried a bomb on a bus intending it to go off and it did so, we have no doubt that the bomber would be guilty of an offence under the section, whether the bomber was a suicide bomber or succeeded in getting off the bus before the bomb went off.

There remains Miss Bradberry's final argument that it is necessary to distinguish between something which interferes with the vehicle in the sense that the vehicle itself is damaged or otherwise altered, for example by dropping a brick on it, and something which is essentially an interference with its driving by the motorist. We can see that if the act is simply one of distraction of the motorist, that would not be an interference with the vehicle. But the braking system is a mechanical part of the car and we reject the argument that pulling the brake on while the car is being driven does not amount to or cannot be regarded by a jury as amounting to interfering with the motor vehicle. In the ordinary and natural sense of the words it is an interference with the vehicle. It is an interference with the vehicle by interfering with a mechanical part of it. For those reasons, we reject the argument that the judge misinterpreted the section and accordingly the appeal must be dismissed.

We add this comment, which is not strictly relevant in this case. We note that the offence is capable of being committed by a negligent act. We can see possible ground for concern if a case which was essentially one of negligence, but arguably negligence falling short of gross negligence, were prosecuted by this route as a form of unlawful act manslaughter. If such a situation were to arise it would be necessary, for example, to consider what Lord Atkins said in the leading motor manslaughter case of Andrews [1937] AC 576. No such argument has been advanced in the present case, and in our view rightly so. It was perhaps an unnecessary complication for the prosecution to have relied on unlawful act manslaughter in this case, rather than taking what might have seemed the more natural approach of presenting the case as one of gross negligence manslaughter, but on the facts of this case we find it impossible to conclude that the jury could have come to any other verdict than guilty if the case had been prosecuted as one of gross negligence manslaughter. For those reasons this appeal must be dismissed.