Single-Act Propensity

Abstract

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 expanded the range of situations in which evidence of defendants' bad character can become admissible in criminal trials. In R v Hanson (2005), in the first appeals brought under the new legislation, the Court of Appeal supplied general guidance on how trial courts were to construe the principal provisions. In relation to gateway (d) the court declared: ‘there is no minimum number of events necessary to demonstrate’ an accused's propensity. A single item of misconduct might therefore suffice. When the Act first came into force, some prosecutors undoubtedly sought to exploit the bad character provisions to the full. This article reviews one, admittedly, artificial category of cases, where the Crown has sought to adduce only single acts of misconduct, in order to derive some idea of how expansively or restrictively the courts, and more especially the Court of Appeal, in practice interpret the bad character provisions.