R v Chakiah Leon Lambert

The appellant, Chakiah Lambert, was born on 11 October 1998. In August 2018, therefore, he was 19 years old.

He appeals, by leave of the single judge, against a sentence that was imposed on 25 March 2022 for an offence of conspiracy to commit robbery, which was committed in August 2018.

His conviction appeal was dismissed by the full court, which at the same time allowed an appeal against conviction by a co-defendant named Morgan. That judgment is R v Morgan and Lambert [2022] EWCA Crim 1554. At the time when that judgment was delivered, there was an outstanding retrial which was directed in the case of Morgan, following the quashing of his conviction. In consequence of that, an order was made, pending that retrial, preventing the reporting of that judgment. The co-defendant Morgan has now been dealt with, having relatively recently pleaded guilty to the offence of conspiracy to commit robbery, and received a sentence of imprisonment. Therefore that earlier judgment dealing with the conviction appeals can now be published. The sentence in the case of Morgan fell away because of the quashing of his conviction. The full court granted leave to the appellant to appeal against his sentence, but decided not to deal with the appeal in 2022 but that it would await the outcome of the retrial of Morgan so that if he were convicted, both his appeal and that of this appellant could be dealt with at the same time. The full court handed down that judgment on 22 November 2022. No doubt the court did not anticipate that a period of two and a half years, or thereabouts, would elapse before the retrial of Morgan was disposed of, thus allowing Lambert's appeal to be considered by the court. However, that is what happened. There were a number of significant delays in dealing with Morgan's retrial, which was adjourned on several occasions. It was finally fixed for January of this year. On 28 January 2025, as we have said, Morgan pleaded guilty, and on 31 January 2025 he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, which was ordered to run consecutively to another sentence which he was already serving. The length of that sentence is entirely irrelevant to the position of the appellant, because the plea was entered on a particular basis in the case of Morgan, and also the sentence was adjusted to take account of totality, with the result that a sentence was imposed which, if it had stood on its own, would have been far too short.

The facts which gave rise to the single count of conspiracy to commit robbery were fully set out in the earlier judgment of this court which resulted in the quashing of Morgan's conviction, the neutral citation of which is cited above. For that reason it is possible to take the facts shortly for the purposes of this judgment.

The sequence of events began on 4 August 2018 when a white Alfa Romeo was stolen in a dwelling house burglary in Solihull. That burglary took place during the night when people were at home.

That vehicle next came to the attention of the police on the afternoon of 14 August 2018. A witness saw two males, wearing balaclavas, acting suspiciously in a residential area near Birmingham. The white Alfa Romeo was seen. It now displayed false number plates. After that sighting, the Alfa Romeo went to another place, not far away, where a robbery took place.

Mrs Asha Kohli drove into her driveway at home in Wolverhampton in her white Volkswagen Golf. Her two children, aged 4 and 8, were in the car. A group of four males, wearing face coverings, approached her in the car. One of them had a handgun. It was dealt with by the judge on the basis that it was an imitation handgun, although its true nature was never actually determined. The man who was holding the weapon said, "Give me the fucking keys". Mrs Kohli threw the keys on the ground and she then frantically scrambled to remove her children from the vehicle so that they would not be taken away in it by the men as they left. She succeeded in getting the children out of the car just in time. She and they were terrified and very seriously distressed. Her husband was nearby and saw part of what had happened. He noticed another white saloon nearby. That was the Alfa Romeo.

At about 8 am on the following day, 15 August, four males wearing dark clothing and with face coverings arrived at a Tesco Express at Rowley Regis. One of them had a hammer and another had a knife. This arrival was timed to coincide with the filling of the cash machines by security officers from Loomis. One of those officers was threatened with the hammer. The robbers were able to gain access to the cash machine and the cash boxes, and they stole cash to the value of £71,740. A white Volkswagen Golf was seen speeding away from the robbery.

The appellant was not one of those four men. He was at work at this time. It was not alleged that he was physically present at the time of the robbery.

Mrs Kohli's Volkswagen Golf was discoverd not far away, abandoned on a road. It had false number plates and contained some £20 notes. It was forensically examined. The appellant's palm prints were found on the false number plates, both at the front and the rear of the vehicle.

The following day, the white Alfa Romeo was captured by ANPR cameras on the A41 at Horsely Heath. Police officers caused the vehicle to stop. Four occupants, one of whom was the appellant, made off in an attempt to escape. The appellant was chased and detained. As he ran, he threw away a set of keys for the Alfa Romeo. When he was detained, he was found to be in possession of a black balaclava and gloves.

That will suffice as a description of the facts. The evidence upon which the prosecution relied in order to prove the involvement both of the appellant and of Morgan was complex. It included locational data from mobile phones and communications' data. Some analysis of that is in the public domain in the first judgment of this court from 2022.

The sentencing judge, His Honour Judge Butterfield KC, treated the Tesco robbery as the principal offence for the purposes of guideline categorisation. He held that the appropriate guideline was that for professional, planned, commercial robberies and that the appropriate category for this robbery was A1. High culpability category A was apparent from the production of a bladed article to threaten violence. It was also a group offence committed by four offenders. The sum stolen could properly be described as "very high", which resulted in the case being categorised for the purposes of harm as category 1.

Category A1 has a starting point of 16 years' custody and a range of 12 to 20 years. The judge identified the various aggravating factors associated with the Tesco robbery and also factors making it less serious. The offence was described as not being among the most professional and sophisticated types of crime and that, together with personal mitigation, including in particular the age of the appellant, resulted in the judge moving to the bottom of that category range to derive a sentence of 12 years' custody for the Tesco robbery.

It is worth observing that 12 years falls within the category range for a category A2 robbery, and also within the category range for a B1 robbery.

The judge then turned to the principal aggravating factor which was present in this case, which was that the Tesco robbery did not (for sentencing purposes) stand on its own. The offence committed on the previous day against Mrs Kohli was itself an extremely serious offence of robbery. It was committed by a group of masked men against a woman in the driveway of her own home, and the offenders had clearly targeted her by surveying the scene and choosing her as the victim, knowing that she was accompanied by her two young children. There was an imitation firearm, designed to cause terror.

Those factors on their own would, if that robbery had stood on its own, have plainly required a sentence significantly in excess of the kind of sentence which might follow from a street or less sophisticated commercial robbery. In the end, the judge did not categorise that separately. It is unnecessary for this court to determine what the appropriate categorisation of it would be if it had stood alone. It is enough to say that it was an extremely serious offence for the reasons we have given, and also because it was committed in order to supply the necessary car so that the robbery on the following day could also be committed.

Finally, the Volkswagen Golf was not the only vehicle which had been concealed with false number plates to be used in this series of criminality. The Alfa Romeo, which had been stolen in a burglary about ten days earlier is also an aggravating factor.

Accordingly, having concluded that 12 years' imprisonment was an appropriate sentence, having regard to all the circumstances of the Tesco robbery, the judge then added a further two years to that to reflect the rest of the offending which we have just described. The result was the sentence of 14 years' imprisonment, against which the appellant now appeals with leave.

In giving leave, the single judge identified two points which she considered to be arguable. The first was the judge's categorisation of the Tesco robbery; and the second was the fact that the judge did not explain how, if at all, he had factored in the fact that the appellant was not a participant in the Tesco robbery, although he had clearly played a part in setting it up and was found still in the Alfa Romeo on the following day in company with Morgan, who was also part of the team. Those are the two points which Mr Metzger has placed before us in support of this appeal in concise but persuasive submissions.

The categorisation of the offence of robbery at Tesco as a category A1 offence, and the application of the guideline for professionally planned commercial robberies, was in our judgment entirely appropriate. This was sophisticated criminality, which included obtaining two vehicles and concealing them. It involved a gang of criminals who had equipped themselves with a hammer and a knife. Anyone involved in the planning and preparation for this offence, as the appellant was, must have contemplated that the security guards would not simply hand over more than £70,000 in cash. It was plainly necessary for them to be subjected to a significant and credible threat of violence in order for that to occur, and that is what happened. The appellant, in preparing for that crime by obtaining the Volkswagen Golf on the previous day, must have appreciated that the crime would involve significant threatened violence. That means that a sentence, following a trial, of 16 years' imprisonment as a starting point would have been justified. But that starting point, as the judge appreciated, needed to be adjusted to reflect the nature of the offence, the participation of the appellant and his age. Those factors caused the judge to move to the bottom of the relevant category range, which, as we have pointed out, is a sentence which features in other ranges too.

In our judgment it is not arguable that in selecting category A1 of this guideline, the judge erred in any way. Even if such an argument were to prevail and a sentence of significantly less than 12 years' imprisonment for the Tesco robbery may have been appropriate for the appellant, that would not assist him. The reason for that is because the additional two years for his participation in the horrifying offence against Mrs Kohli was substantially adjusted by the judge in order to ensure that the total sentence was just and proportionate. In other words, if the judge had adopted a categorisation of the Tesco robbery which resulted in a shorter term, it would not have been necessary to reduce the sentence for the robbery of Mrs Kohli to the extent that it was.

The question for us is whether a term of 14 years' custody for this appellant for this very serious and sophisticated criminality was manifestly excessive or wrong in principle. In our judgment it clearly was not. This sentence was richly deserved. We agree that it may have been better if the judge had specifically dealt with the fact that the appellant had an alibi for the Tesco robbery, but in all the circumstances, and for the reasons which we have attempted to explain, the judge's approach to the involvement of the appellant in the totality of the offending cannot be faulted.

Accordingly, and for those reasons, this appeal against sentence is dismissed.