The Royal Court put a Relief Magistrate back in his place for giving the “benefit of the doubt” to an offender while he appealed against his allegedly “outrageous” sentence.
Russell John Barton (53), who had a string of offences to his name, had pleaded guilty to common assault and was sentenced to eight months in jail in November 2024.
He and the prosecution had conflicting accounts of the assault, but the court ultimately sided with the Crown, which said that he had struck his victim, causing him to fall to the ground and suffer “bruising and abrasions” to his head, cheek and hand.
Barton then said he would appeal his sentence, arguing that an eight-month sentence for what he maintained was only a “push” was “outrageous” and “wholly excessive”.
Relief Magistrate David Le Cornu granted him bail in January while the appeal process got underway – but immediately hit opposition.
The Attorney General said Barton shouldn’t get bail, and the case was sent to the Royal Court, who heard it the next day.
In a written judgment, the Royal Court noted that the test for granting bail pending appeal is “well established” – it should only be done in “exceptional circumstances” where it appears on the face of it that the “appeal is likely to be successful or where there is a risk that the sentence will have been served by the time the appeal has been heard”.
However, the Royal Court said that in this case “it does not appear that the Relief Magistrate… necessarily applied his mind to it” and that his decision was based around giving Barton the “benefit of the doubt”.
For the Royal Court to take away the bail, it had to show that the Relief Magistrate’s decision was “unreasonable in all the circumstances”, and the judge and Jurats couldn’t find any exceptional circumstances that justified the Magistrate’s Court’s decision.
With disagreements over what actually happened, the Royal Court said they it was not possible to say whether the appeal was likely to be successful.
“We cannot and do not say that any of the arguments that the Appellant wishes to advance on appeal are hopeless but… the test is not whether there are arguable prospects on appeal but whether the appeal is prima facie likely to be successful,” the Deputy Bailiff wrote.
The court also noted that the appeal hearing was set for mid-February, meaning Barton would serve only a small portion of his sentence before that date, and as such, there was no risk that the sentence would be fully served before the appeal could be heard.
As such, it was decided that Barton would “continue to serve his sentence until the hearing of his appeal in a few weeks’ time”. The appeal judgment is yet to be published.
Deputy Bailiff Robert MacRae was presiding, sitting with Jurats Jane Ronge and Mike Entwistle.