UK Law Articles
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The Times
May 14 1999
Judge makes JPs pay for jailing error
BY RICHARD FORD AND PAUL WILKINSON
MAGISTRATES have been ordered to pay a bill of between £2,000 and £3,000 after they broke legal principles and jailed two women - a 70-year-old grandmother with a Zimmer frame and a mother of three - for failing to pay poll and council tax.
A High Court judge took the unusual step because the women were jailed in their absence, Doncaster magistrates having taken no action to find out why they were not at the hearing.
Mr Justice Collins condemned the magistrates for sending the grandmother to New Hall jail, near Wakefield. He made a legal costs order estimated at £3,000 against each of the magistrates because "there were so many breaches of the appropriate principles [of law]".
Both women had been given custodial sentences which had been suspended after they agreed to pay. When they failed to keep up the payments, the court ordered them to appear before magistrates but they did not arrive.
Magistrates jailed them in their absence without issuing a warrant for them to come to court to explain why they had not kept up the payments.
Elizabeth Jack, 71, who was on income support and, after hip replacements and a subsequent fall, walked with the help of a Zimmer frame, was sentenced to 90 days. She was jailed for failing to pay £600 poll tax arrears.
Prison officers told solicitors about the case after finding Mrs Jack, of Edlington in Doncaster, in distress. Mrs Jack, who shares a house with her former husband, was released on bail after spending a day in the jail's health centre.
The same bench, chaired by Joan Lucas, jailed Alison Christison, 31, a single parent, for 28 days. She had outstanding council tax of £97.95, plus £188 costs. She received income support of £79.10 a week plus additional monthly benefits of £116 a month.
Miss Christison, of Bentley, Yorkshire, was arrested by bailiffs and taken to the jail after she had taken two of her children, aged seven and three, to school. She was given no opportunity to arrange for their care. In her case, too, prison officers who witnessed her distress contacted solicitors who obtained bail.
The judge said: "It has been said over and over again that the principle to be applied is that these orders of commitment are to be made only as a last resort - not as a punishment for non-payment, but as a means to extract payment."
Helen Dray, of HMB, the Stoke-on-Trent firm that represented both women, said: "The courts are losing patience with magistrates who repeatedly make the same errors."
