R v Micaiah Marley

This is a renewed application for leave to appeal against sentence, for which an extension of time of 271 days is required, following refusal by the single judge.

On 13 April 2023, following a trial in the Crown Court at Cardiff before His Honour Judge Williams and a jury, the applicant (now aged 31) was convicted of two counts of kidnapping, three counts of false imprisonment and one count of blackmail arising from the kidnap and false imprisonment of two men in Cardiff on 11 and 12 December 2020.

The facts relating to the offences are set out helpfully in the Criminal Appeal Office Summary and need not be repeated here. Including the applicant, nine defendants have been convicted of offences arising from this incident as a result of Operation Arbus.

On 27 October 2023, the applicant was given an extended sentence, pursuant to section 279 of the Sentencing Act 2020 of 19 years, comprising a custodial term of 15 years and an extended licence period of four years.

On 14 February 2025, a Serious Crime Prevention Order ("SCPO") was imposed for a period of five years running from the applicant's release.

The applicant is in custody and does not have legal representation. He applied for leave to appeal by submitting an Easy Read Form NG, received by the Criminal Appeal Office on 28 August 2024. In support of his application he also wrote a letter to the Criminal Appeal Office in October 2024. All of this was included in the material which went before the single judge.

Following the decision of the single judge, the applicant issued further written submissions, again of his own composition, received by the Criminal Appeal Office in May and July 2025.

Shortly before the listed date for the hearing of this renewed application, the applicant wrote to the court, applying to attend the hearing via video link and requesting the opportunity to address the court. We refused that application. Since the applicant is in custody, he is not entitled to attend this hearing without leave. Further, he does not have rights of audience, unless granted by the court. He had refused the opportunity to apply for legal representation in an earlier undated letter. He has had, and has taken up, the opportunity to make detailed written submissions. He has not identified any new factor or circumstance that he would wish to raise orally before us that he has been unable to advance to date in writing.

In the written materials which were before the single judge the applicant submitted that a 15 year custodial term was manifestly excessive, relying on the following factors: that he has no history of violence; that the victims were uninjured; that the victims were known drug dealers; that the applicant suffers from ADHD and autism; that the applicant was a business owner and a full-time father and carer of a 10 year old son who was suffering from mental health problems; that, as the applicant was serving a sentence for another offence, no account had been taken of time on remand; the fact that the applicant's time on remand included the Covid period; and that he had witnessed a murder and numerous suicides in prison, where he himself had been of exemplary behaviour.

In refusing the application the single judge said as follows:

The applicant's letters, received in May and July 2025, contain substantially the same arguments as those which were before the single judge, save for the following additional submissions. First and in summary only, it is suggested that the single judge had misrepresented the circumstances of the earlier offending involving the possession of a mobile telephone in custody. It is suggested that the applicant was in possession of his mobile phone while on remand and would not haver possessed the phone at all in custody, had he not been placed on remand. Secondly, it is suggested that the sentence was unfair when compared with sentences for similar offences, and especially those received by his co-defendants. Thirdly, it is suggested that the judge's consideration of the applicant's prior convictions ignored the context in which they were committed, and the applicant's status as a juvenile at the time of those offences.

It is also said that the imposition of an extended determinate sentence and a SCPO together was disproportionate. As to this last point, however, we note that there is no separate application to challenge the SCPO and in fact no actual challenge to the SCPO itself at all. This last point thus falls away.

We have had the opportunity to review the Form NG, the applicant's written submissions and the written reasons of the single judge. Having read the papers and considered the merits of the application independently, we conclude that the single judge was correct to refuse the application for leave to appeal for the reasons that he gave. The applicant had played a leading role in a sophisticated, organised group which specialised in kidnap, extortion and blackmail.

Nor are we persuaded that any of the applicant's renewed submissions, lodged since refusal by the single judge, disclose any arguable error, even if we were to take the exceptional course of entertaining supplemental submissions following the refusal of leave.

We pause our judgment, having just received a written note from the court clerk. We are informed that last night an application to adjourn today's hearing was made. That, self-evidently, has not reached us until now. We will rise briefly to consider it.

We resume the judgment of the court. We refuse the application to adjourn for reasons that we will give at the conclusion of the judgment. We repeat that we are not persuaded that any of the applicant's submissions made after refusal by the single judge disclose any arguable error. Even if we were to take the exceptional course of allowing such submissions following refusal by the single judge to be entertained.

First, the sentencing judge was fully aware of the details of the applicant's offending history. The applicant's pre-sentence report concludes that the applicant poses a high risk of serious harm to the public, in part because the applicant had returned to offending, due to his ongoing association with criminal gang members. As the single judge commented, there is rightly no challenging to the finding of dangerousness.

Any contextual factors relating to mitigation, such as the applicant's age at the time of the offending, and his family circumstances, were considered and taken into account in the overall sentence imposed by the judge. We note that caring responsibilities can carry only limited weight in the context of what was inevitably going to be a lengthy custodial sentence. We also note that the judge had the benefit of a full and very well presented mitigation bundle specific to the applicant, which the judge had clearly read.

Secondly, it is not arguable that the applicant's sentence was manifestly unfair when compared with the sentences received by his co-defendants. Disparity arguments are always difficult to maintain: see, for example, R v Anandarajah (Jabinthan) [2012] EWCA Crim 1689 at [16]. As identified by the judge in his sentencing remarks, the applicant played a leading role in the organisation and commission of the offending, and took the lead in intimidating the victims. As the judge put it, the applicant was involved "from start to finish", arranged for an address to be used, and threatened one victim with a gun and a knife, and to kill him. Having had the benefit of hearing the evidence at trial, the judge was fully entitled to conclude that the applicant was a "level 1" offender who warranted the sentence in question.

For the foregoing reasons we consider that the applicant's submissions do not disclose any arguable ground to indicate that the sentence was manifestly excessive or otherwise wrong in law.

In the absence of any good reason for the significant delay in bringing the application, and in the absence of any merit in the application itself, we also decline to grant the necessary extension of time.

Both applications are accordingly refused.

We now turn to the application to adjourn. After we had announced our decision on the merits of this renewed application, the court clerk drew to our attention a letter dated today, 3 February 2025, which reached the Criminal Appeal Office at some time between eight and nine o'clock this morning. In that letter a company called True Matrix Limited (not a firm of solicitors, but a legal consultancy specialising in criminal and regulatory work) sought an adjournment of this hearing. As we have already indicated, that application came to the court's attention, through no unreasonable delay on the part of the Office, after we had announced our decision in substance.

We refused the application to adjourn. It is made, self-evidently, extremely late in the day – and indeed too late in the day. The letter suggests that there has been reasonable co-operation on the part of the applicant with True Matrix Limited, and it is stated that the applicant did not receive the listing notification until 29 January. We would, however, note, as recorded at the beginning of our judgment, that on 28 January the applicant made an application to represent himself at the hearing this morning. He was, by that time, well in a position to make any applications that he saw fit. No application to adjourn was made at that stage.

There is no good reason to adjourn the hearing. Indeed, we delivered the substance of our decision before the application to adjourn came to our attention.