R v Keith Bunce

The provisions of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992 apply to this offence. Under these provisions, where a sexual offence has been committed against a person, no matter relating to that person shall, during that person's lifetime, be included in any publication if it is likely to lead members of the public to identify that person as the victim of that offence. This prohibition applies unless waived or lifted in accordance with section 3 of the Act. Given those reporting restrictions this judgment shall not refer to the victim by name.

On 25 September 2024 in the Crown Court at Bristol, the appellant was sentenced to a total of 28 years' imprisonment for multiple offences, namely two counts of rape, 13 counts of assault by penetration, one count of sexual assault and three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. He appeals against that sentence with the leave of the single judge.

The victim of the offending was a vulnerable young woman. She had suffered from selective mutism from childhood and was a socially isolated child. While at school she was befriended by a man named Martin Reading, one of the school caretakers. Having groomed her he went on to sexually abuse her over many years. When the victim left school Reading arranged employment for her. It was through that employment that the victim met the appellant, another school caretaker.

The appellant secured the victim's trust, following which the victim disclosed to him details of the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Reading. The HR manager was informed and Reading was suspended. During the subsequent police investigation the appellant appeared to offer the victim considerable emotional and practical support. He also made a statement to the police assisting with the investigation. He attended medical appointments with her, he spent many hours messaging her, reassuring her that she was not at fault and that she was a lovely young lady. He expressed concern about her mental health, including to the police, their employers and medical professionals. He also assisted her with getting another flat, the victim having been left homeless as a result of the offending by the co-defendant.

In April 2016, the victim who was then in her mid-20s, disclosed to the police that the appellant had been abusing her since September 2015. The appellant first sexually assaulted the victim in the caretaker's office at the school where they worked. He said, "I want to touch you down there" and when she did not react, he put his hand into the elasticated waist of her joggers and touched her vagina. He told her that he wanted to give her an orgasm and said she had missed out on a lot. He said he wanted her to experience sexual things so that she would be "ready for when she got a boyfriend".

The following week he took her to one of the boiler rooms. He locked the door and proceeded to penetrate her vagina with his fingers. This happened in the boiler room and occurred on other occasions, as reflected in a multiple incident count. He digitally penetrated her vagina every day. After a while it occurred several times a day, whenever he felt like it. It happened in different places in the school and at her home. The appellant told her "he would not use his dick as this would be cheating on his wife". The appellant penetrated the victim's vagina with different objects including the handle of a school bell, screwdrivers, cucumbers and a banana. He penetrated her anus with his fingers on multiple occasions. He made the victim buy a dildo online and tried on several occasions to insert it into her but it was too large and trying to insert it caused the victim pain. The appellant told her he wanted her to feel what a "big dick" felt like and he wanted her to take a black man for him. The appellant made the victim perform oral sex on him on multiple occasions, reflected in the rape counts.

The appellant also used a cane and homemade corporal punishment implements to strike the victim's bottom. He initially told her that this might help her to talk. He made her get on all fours with her trousers and underwear round her ankles. He took photographs including of injuries and marks he had caused. Digital downloads from devices showed a long-held interest in corporal punishment. One photograph of the victim was captioned "No please, no is all I hear as the cane makes its dance on my wife's bottom". There was an occasion when the appellant beat the victim’s bottom then left her on all fours and semi-naked returning with the school bell and a screwdriver which he simultaneously inserted into the victim's vagina and anus. She tried to get away and fight him off but the appellant used his strength to overpower her. It is unnecessary to go into further detail of the abuse, suffice it to say that it is apparent that the appellant intended humiliation and degradation of the victim beyond that inherent in the offences.

When arrested and interviewed the appellant gave a prepared statement in which he said there had been three sexual encounters between the pair, on two occasions she had performed oral sex on him at her instigation and on the other he had inadvertently touched her vagina. He then answered "no comment" to all questions.

His mobile phone was seized and examined revealing that the appellant had been seeking to persuade the victim to retract her allegations. He threatened suicide, said that the police could not be trusted and said that they would use the fact that she was damaged by the Reading abuse against her.

In sentencing the appellant and Reading, the judge said that they had both been convicted of the wholesale and despicable abuse of a highly vulnerable girl with special needs and communication difficulties. She had been left horribly damaged by them using her sexually without consent. The judge said that the appellant recruited and groomed the victim for his perverted sexual pleasure. He was fully aware of how damaged and vulnerable the victim was. The judge described the assaults by penetration using objects as equivalent to and, on the facts, even worse than rape. The judge described the case as involving a "campaign" of abuse, which when looked at overall justified placing both culpability and harm into the upper brackets within the relevant sentencing guidelines.

The challenge for the judge was to properly reflect totality to arrive at a sentence that was proportionate having regard to the overall offending. His approach was to identify a single overall sentence which reflected all the individual offences but scaled down for totality. In this way he arrived at an accumulated sentence of 28 years, passing that sentence concurrently on each of the counts of assault by penetration and rape, lesser sentences were passed for the sexual assault and assault occasioning actual bodily harm counts, these also being made concurrent.

The judge provided a table in which he set out the notional sentences he would have passed on each count had they stood alone. His approach to the more serious offences was to place them in the mid-category of harm but higher bracket for culpability within the sentencing guidelines. Thus, the notional sentences for a single count of oral rape was 10 years, for a count representing multiple oral rapes 13 years, 10 years for a count representing multiple incidents of anal penetration, for the other assaults by penetration 8 years, 3 years for the sexual assault representing the first occasion on which the appellant touched the victim's vagina, 2½ years for a multiple incident assault count and 18 months for each of two single assaults. As the judge rightly acknowledged in his sentencing remarks, it was artificial to attempt to break the calculation of the appropriate overall sentence down in this way, however his table provided a starting point demonstrating how he had approached his computation.

By his grounds of appeal the appellant contends that the sentence the judge arrived at was manifestly excessive.

In her very well-focused written and oral submissions, Ms Regan realistically acknowledged that the offences were nasty and deserving of a sentence of imprisonment of some considerable length. She also acknowledged that the circumstances of this offending were extremely unusual. However, she argued that the judge misapplied the sentencing guidelines. She contended that the judge appeared to rely on the pattern of abuse as justification to elevate both harm and culpability into the highest bracket.

Although Ms Regan accepted the extreme nature of the category 2 factors may elevate an offence into category 1, and that the judge was not sentencing for individual offences but was sentencing for a course of conduct, nevertheless, she argued that the judge had erred in his application of the sentencing guidelines. She submitted that it was hard to disentangle the harm caused by the defendant from that caused by the abuse by the co-defendant. Further, she argued that the judge erred in importing harm factors into the assessment of culpability and that none of the category A culpability factors set out in the Sentencing Guidelines were in fact present. For all those reasons she submitted the judge, although sentencing for multiple offences committed over a 7-month period, nevertheless arrived at a sentence that was manifestly excessive.

Ms Regan also argued that the judge failed to give sufficient weight to the mitigation of the appellant, including the support that he gave the victim in connection with the abuse by the co-defendant. In relation to that argument, we note the finding of the judge who said:

The judge said that although it may be difficult to disentangle the origins of extreme harm suffered by the victim "the persistent and repeated nature of the abuse" was a significant driving factor putting the level of harm into the top category for each offender. He recognised that if each offence was truly viewed in isolation, many could be viewed as culpability band B rather than A. However, they were not isolated or opportunistic offences but rather part of a pattern of abuse. The judge said that this justified elevating culpability to the higher bracket.

We do not accept that this amounts to double counting the same factor or to wrongly importing factors only relevant to harm into the culpability assessment. The judge observed that the circumstances demonstrated that the offences were not opportunistic, he might well have said that the sustained pattern of abuse demonstrated a significant degree of planning. We have listened to the submissions of Ms Regan in connection with that and to her argument that the victim kept items of clothing and implements at home. Nevertheless, we do not think that that detracts from the clear pattern that emerges in this case and consider that there was a significant degree of planning involved in the abuse perpetrated by this appellant. There was also evidence of recording at least some of the offences by way of taking photographs. In relation to the later offending we consider it could properly be said that there was evidence of previous violence against the victim. We accept that this is not the usual case that perhaps that guideline has in mind, namely, the commission of offences in the context of domestic violence but nevertheless looking at the whole picture it is clear that the appellant did use violence against the victim and that definitely formed part of the context of the offending as a whole.

Overall, in our judgment, it cannot realistically be contended that the appellant's culpability was anything other than high, albeit the judge's table showed that he did not treat the vast majority of offences as high culpability within the guidelines when looking at each offence in isolation. It was though obvious that the judge could not simply add all the notional sentences together and then apply a discount for totality. The individual sentences totalled over 170 years. The judge's approach of identifying a single total for the offending as a whole, ensuring that the sentence reflected all the offending without becoming disproportionate, was a sensible one. There were multiple aggravating factors including the targeting of a vulnerable victim in the context of purportedly supporting her with past abuse. Although the significant attempts to pressure the victim to withdraw the allegations would have been an aggravating factor, it had to be kept in mind that the appellant had been prosecuted and sentenced for perverting the course of justice in relation to those actions. In those circumstances, the judge did not rely on the interference with the victim's reporting as a factor elevating the sentence. The appellant's lack of any other previous convictions carried relatively little weight in the circumstances of this offending, as did the character references provided for him. We have already expressed our views in relation to the argument that the support provided to the victim was mitigation - we do not regard that as a mitigating factor in the circumstances of this case.

Standing back, the question for us is whether an overall sentence of 28 years was manifestly excessive in all the circumstances. Having carefully reviewed those circumstances, we conclude that it was not. This was undoubtedly a severe sentence but it reflected offending of a very extreme nature. We are conscious that the trial judge who heard all the evidence was best placed to make a proper assessment of both culpability and harm, taking account of the totality of the offending. In our view, the overall sentence he imposed was reasonably open to him in the particular and unusual circumstances of this case. For those reasons this appeal is dismissed.