R v Michael Jordan

MR JUSTICE CONSTABLE: In 2018 the applicant was sentenced to 30 months' imprisonment for three offences of inciting a girl under 13 to engage in sexual activity, breach of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order ("SHPO") and failure to comply with the requirements of a suspended sentence order. On that date the applicant was made subject to a further SHPO dated 9 February 2018 for a limited period of five years.

On 28 March 2020 Public Protection Officers attended the applicant's address. He appeared nervous and told the officers that he needed to wash his hands. The officers followed the applicant upstairs and discovered that he had thrown a flash drive out of his bedroom window. The applicant admitted that he had been using his mother's computer to access the internet. The applicant had accessed the website Pinterest and downloaded images of girls and boys aged around 15. He failed to disclose that he had a Pinterest account in accordance with the terms of the SHPO and later admitted in interview that he had deleted the internet search history on his mother's computer. Deletion of his internet history was again a matter dealt with and prohibited by the terms of the SHPO.

As a result on 18 August 2020 in the Crown Court at Cambridge the applicant, then aged 28, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment suspended for 24 months, together with a rehabilitation activity requirement of up to 40 days and 80 hours unpaid work on two counts of breaching an SHPO, contrary to section 103I(1) and (3) of the Sexual Harm Prevention Order 2003.

The judge also imposed a further SHPO to last indefinitely. The applicant was again before the courts on 22 March 2025 when he pleaded guilty to two charges of breaching the 2020 SHPO by way of deleting material from his mobile phone. He was committed for sentence.

When the case came before the Crown Court sitting at Huntingdon on 4 June 2025 it was noted that the SHPO which the applicant had breached appeared to be an unlawful order. As a result, the applicant seeks leave to appeal against the imposition of the SHPO and applies for an extension of time of 1,743 days in which to do so. The appeal was referred to the full court by the Registrar and the applicant was granted a representation order. We are extremely grateful to the assistance of both Mr Fleming of counsel for the applicant and Mr Hollingsworth who appeared for the respondent who both set out succinctly and clearly the position before this court.

The short point is whether the imposition of the SHPO in August 2020 was lawful. We are clear that it was not.

At the time of the hearing on 18 August 2020 the power to impose an SHPO on conviction was then found in section 103A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. This was at the time in the following terms:

Breach of an SHPO is not an offence listed in either Schedule 3 or Schedule 5 of the Sexual Offences Act. It follows that where a defendant is convicted in later proceedings of breaching an existing SHPO, there is no power to impose a new SHPO in those later proceedings.

As rightly pointed out by Mr Fleming, and not disputed by Mr Hollingsworth, a very similar situation was considered by this court in R v MT [2023] EWCA Crim 531. A new SHPO had been imposed on a defendant when he was convicted of breaching a Sexual Offences Prevention Order ("SOPO"), the predecessor of the SHPO. The court confirmed at [29] that the new SHPO was unlawful and had to be quashed. Similarly, in R v Wilkes [2022] EWCA Crim 525 a new SHPO could not be made when a defendant appeared before the court in 2021 for breaching an SHPO imposed in 2018: see [3] - [11] and [40]. Wilkes demonstrates that there is no different approach depending on whether the defendant is before the court for breach of an SHPO or an SOPO. In neither case does the court have the power to make a new SHPO.

Although consideration was quite properly given to whether the 2020 SHPO could be considered a variation of the 2018 SHPO, pursuant to section 103E of the Sexual Offences Act, so as to render it lawful, the answer is that it cannot. Section 103E prescribes who may apply for a variation. Those people are the defendant, the Chief Officer of Police for the area in which the defendant resides or a Chief Officer of Police who believes the defendant is in or is intending to come into that Officer's police area. No application by a relevant officer was made in respect of the 2018 SHPO and therefore this section did not apply. The judge did not have the power to make the order he made in 2020.

In these circumstances, it is in the interests of justice to grant the lengthy extension of time and to quash the order made in 2020. No doubt, as has already been discussed, the relevant Chief Constable in the area in which the applicant resides will consider the extent to which it is appropriate to seek the (re)imposition of an SHPO pursuant to section 103A of the Sexual Offences Act.