Burke, R v

LORD JUSTICE LLOYD JONES : 1. On 20 October 2016, following a hearing on that day, the court dismissed in an unreserved judgment the appeal of Jeanette Burke against her conviction on 6 July 2006 at the Crown Court in Liverpool before His Honour Judge Mark Brown and a jury on two counts of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs. 2. In that judgment it followed the approach stated by Hughes LJ, as he then was, in Mushtaq Ahmed v The Queen [2010] EWCA Crim 2899 at [24]. 3. Shortly after that hearing there came to the attention of the members of the court the decision of the Supreme Court in McInnes v HM Advocate [2010] UKSC 7 and the decision of this court in R v Kelly [2015] EWCA Crim 500. As these authorities had not been cited in argument the court asked the Registrar of Criminal Appeals to draw these authorities to the attention of counsel and to invite further submissions in writing. 4. We are most grateful to Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Hughes QC for their helpful written submissions. Having considered the matter further, we are satisfied, for the reasons stated fully in the judgment of a differently constituted court in R v Garland [2016] EWCA Crim 1743 that there is no inconsistency between the approach stated in Ahmed and that in McInnes and Kelly. In any event, this court has to apply the law of England and Wales, under which the test is whether the relevant material causes this court to doubt the safety of the verdict. 5. We therefore have no cause to revise our conclusion that we are entirely satisfied that the appellant’s convictions are safe.