R v Mark Ross

On 12 March 2025 the appellant was convicted of murder following a trial before Goss J at Leeds Crown Court. He had earlier pleaded guilty to a single count of theft. On 14 March 2025 Goss J sentenced him to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 29 years and 162 days on the murder, and a concurrent sentence of 6 months for the theft. He now appeals against sentence with the leave of the single judge.

We deal first of all with the murder. On 20 August 2024 at around 6.45 pm, the victim, Claudiu Carol Kondor, was delivering parcels for Amazon in the Armley area of Leeds. He was using his own silver transit van and was wearing a high vis jacket. His job required him to load his van from the Amazon depot before driving to various customers' addresses and delivering items to them. His van contained a large number of parcels. Whilst Mr Kondor was delivering a parcel away from his vehicle which was parked up with the engine running, the appellant climbed into the driver's seat in order to drive the van away, stealing the van and its contents. Mr Kondor tried to stop him by opening the front nearside passenger door of the van and attempting to climb in, but his actions did not prevent the appellant from driving away with Mr Kondor hanging on to his van through the open front nearside passenger door.

Mr Kondor hung on to the van as the appellant drove away. The appellant drove at speeds in excess of 60 mph in residential areas with Mr Kondor still hanging on. One motorist was compelled to make an evasive manoeuvre to avoid being struck by the van. She noticed a number of Amazon packages sliding out of the van and falling on to the road as it turned. She saw Mr Kondor hanging on to the van’s door and shouting “Help”. Other eyewitnesses observed the van swerving. Still travelling at speed, the van collided with a parked car, causing damage to the side of the van and to the parked car and inflicting fatal injuries on Mr Kondor. The court has seen the CCTV footage including that of the impact. The whole driving sequence lasted 45 seconds.

A post-mortem examination confirmed that the cause of Mr Kondor's death was severe head and chest injuries.

After the collision the appellant drove on. He met up with others, and the contents of the van were removed.

In due course the police investigation traced down the appellant and he was arrested and interviewed. He did not answer any questions put to him. He entered a guilty plea to manslaughter at the PTPH. His case was that he was unaware that Mr Kondor was hanging on to his van and that he did not intend to cause Mr Kondor serious harm or to kill him because he did not know he was there.

The prosecution case was that the appellant did know that Mr Kondor was hanging on to the van because the van door was open and Mr Kondor could be seen to be hanging on. Moreover, the appellant drove quickly and erratically and was weaving from side to side in manoeuvres that were designed to get rid of Mr Kondor, and that when those manoeuvres failed to dislodge Mr Kondor, the appellant deliberately drove into collision with cars parked on the side of the road on two occasions. The first collision was a glancing blow which did not knock Mr Kondor free from the van. The second collision was severe and caused the fatal injuries to Mr Kondor. Expert evidence concluded that the appellant had turned the steering wheel in the direction of the impact.

In relation to the theft, that occurred on 19 April 2024, when at around 4 am the appellant and a co-defendant forced entry into the back of a lorry at Warwick services on the M40. They removed a box of cashmere sweaters and put them into another lorry nearby. The boxes were then returned. The appellant and the co-defendant were found alongside the cashmere sweaters in the back of the lorry that was parked behind the other lorry displaying false plates and with another set of false plates inside. They were arrested.

The appellant was aged 32 at sentence, his date of birth being 11 July 1992. He had 25 convictions for 34 offences spanning the period from 2005 to 2023. His earlier offences included arson, theft, battery, multiple breaches of court orders, affray, common assault, non-dwelling burglary and possessing class B drugs. In 2022 he had been sentenced to a community order for theft and criminal damage; his most recent offence was failing to comply with the requirements of a community order in 2023; and then there was the 2024 theft to be sentenced at the same time as the murder.

The court had two victim personal statements from Mr Kondor’s fiancée. She told of their life together and her grief at Mr Kondor’s loss. She said that Mr Kondor was from Romania and had had a hard life. He had just purchased his van which had been his lifelong ambition.

The judge rehearsed the dreadful facts of the murder. He said that:

The judge referred to Schedule 21 of the Sentencing Act 2020. He said that the murder was for gain, which gave a starting point of 30 years. The judge identified the following aggravating features:

The judge identified the following mitigating features:

The judge imposed a sentence of 6 months' imprisonment on the theft offence to be served concurrently to the sentence for murder.

For the murder the judge imposed a life sentence as he was required to do by law. He set the minimum term at 30 years, less the 203 days spent in custody on remand.

Mr Kealey KC, who was the appellant's advocate at trial as well as on this appeal, has lodged grounds of appeal. He submits that the sentence was manifestly excessive; alternatively, it was wrong in principle. He submits that the judge gave too substantial an uplift for the few aggravating factors in the case but did not give sufficient reduction for the mitigating factors. He argues that there was insufficient regard given to the authorities which had been provided to the court and to the fact that the appellant did not set out to cause any harm and the murder resulted from an unexpected decision by the victim to attempt to impede the offence the appellant was seeking to commit. The appropriate starting point was not 30 years; but alternatively, if the 30-year point was taken, there should have been a considerable lowering of the minimum term to reflect these various features.

The Crown lodged a Respondent's Notice. They submitted that the judge identified the right starting point and reached an overall figure for the minimum term which was severe but not wrong in principle or manifestly excessive. The prosecution (by Mr Harrison KC) points in addition to the aggravation noted by the judge: to the appellant's driving during this incident - that he drove at 61 mph in a 30-mph residential area, that he caused the van to lose traction on a pedestrian crossing, that he swerved the van from side to side, that he deliberately drove the van into collision with two parked vehicles. The expert evidence was that Mr Kondor had been dragged along the road with his feet and legs in contact with the road surface.

We are not with Mr Kealey on his challenge to the judge taking a 30-year starting point. This was a murder for gain – to steal the van and the Amazon parcels inside it - and in our judgment the 30-year start point applied.

We turn to the mainstay of Mr Kealey's submissions, which was that the judge should have reduced the minimum term significantly to reflect the fact that the appellant did not set out to kill or use violence and that the death was the consequence of the unplanned reaction by Mr Kondor in the course of the theft of his van.

We have noted the various authorities on which Mr Kealey relies. All of those authorities relate to the old legislation contained in materially similar terms in Schedule 21 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003.

The two most important authorities for Mr Kealey's purposes are these:

We would accept that there is a difference between setting out to kill and use violence on one hand, and killing or using violence in a way that is unplanned and unpremeditated in the course of committing another offence, on the other hand. In this case the judge found that there was no intention to kill on the part of the appellant, only an intention to cause serious injury, and treated that as some mitigation. But the judge went further, holding that the appellant must have recognised as inevitable that his actions would cause injuries of the gravest kind; and that the appellant had given no real thought to the consequences of his desire to steal the van, which he wished to achieve "at any cost". In this case, therefore, it appears that the judge thought there was not much weight to be attached to the appellant’s lack of intention to kill, because the appellant's purpose was simply to shake off Mr Kondor, however that was to be achieved and whatever the degree of injury thereby inflicted.

The judge also considered the lack of premeditation but here too the factor was of modest weight only. The death occurred in the course of committing another offence. The appellant had seen Mr Kondor's van with its engine running and the van stocked with Amazon parcels and had taken control of the gears and driven off. However, that action was not really a one-off. It has to be set in the context of the appellant's previous offending and what was, for him, a lifestyle choice to steal vehicles, and the stock and contents contained in them.

We reject the submission that the appellant's lack of previous convictions for offences of violence should in some way be counted in his favour. The judge was entitled to treat the appellant's previous convictions as a neutral factor.

So much for the mitigation in the case. There were important aggravating features too. First, there is the intensity of Mr Kondor's suffering in the short period when he was being dragged to his death. This was a terrible way for Mr Kondor to die. Secondly, there is the fact that members of the public witnessed these shocking events, which occurred in daylight and unfolded on the residential streets of Bradford, causing trauma throughout the community.

There were aggravating features of lesser significance too: that Mr Kondor was acting in the course of his employment as a delivery driver, which occupation took him to many different places and environments; that Mr Kondor was engaged in a form of public service when this happened; the theft which had to be taken into account; and that these offences were committed while the appellant was under investigation for a number of other offences.

Standing back, we conclude that it was reasonable for the judge to balance the aggravation and the mitigation and so to arrive at a minimum term of 30 years before deduction of time spent on remand. We are not persuaded that the term imposed was wrong in principle or manifestly excessive.

We therefore dismiss this appeal.