The Court of Appeal today freed a Calshott couple jailed for 28 days for blocking part of a footpath near their home.
Sedley LJ and Latham J suspended 14 days of the sentences imposed upon Leslie and Ann Gillingham on the condition that they remove the obstructions by 3 July. With remission, this meant that the couple, who have already spent seven days in prison, were freed immediately.
However, the remaining 14 days of the sentence will hang over their heads for the next two years and, if they commit any further breaches of the order during that time, they face the prospect of being sent back to prison.
The Gillinghams were jailed after they flouted a court order restraining them from blocking a public right of way running between two areas of land owned by them. Although they had removed a gate after their appeal against the order failed, they subsequently replaced it with a pile of earth with a railway sleeper on top, blocking some 3ft of the path and leaving a gap of 5ft.
Commenting on the committal proceedings against the couple, Sedley LJ said today that it was the responsibility of the local authority and the courts to ensure that the public could pass freely along public paths.
He said that, although the Gillinghams had offered an undertaking at the county court to remove the obstruction, they had not apologised. “The judge was faced with stubborn defiance of his order,” he said.
Describing the dumping of the soil as “a calculated act of defiance”, he continued: “In my view the judge, faced with what happened, had no sensible option but to commit the Gillinghams to prison to mark the gravity of what they had quite consciously done.”
“The judge was faced with litigants who had set out to push the court to the limit and, having reached the limit, they could not object to the court employing the ultimate sanction.”
Today, however, the Gillinghams offered the court a qualified apology, leading to the suspension of half their sentence. But Sedley LJ warned: “Mr and Mrs Gillingham, I hope, will appreciate that the conditions attached to the suspension mean that further complaints will result in reactivation of the committal order.”
- PLS News 22/6/00
