R v Alan Putland

This is a renewed application for leave to appeal sentence after refusal by the single judge.

On 7 July 2025 in the Crown Court at Bournemouth the applicant pleaded guilty upon re-arraignment to an offence of stalking involving serious alarm and distress, contrary to section 4 A(1(a)(b)(ii) and (5) of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 . On 22 August 2025 the applicant was sentenced by His Honour Judge Fuller KC to a sentence of two years and eight months' imprisonment.

The facts of the offending are set out in the Criminal Appeal Office note. We need not repeat all the details here. Briefly, the applicant and his now ex-partner had been together for 20 years and had three children. There was a long background of jealous preoccupations and abusive behaviour on the part of the applicant, as opened by the Crown at the sentencing hearing. His partner eventually ended the relationship and the applicant moved out in January 2024 after which there were repeated episodes of increasingly unpleasant attempts at contact, of pursuing her with emails, voice mail messages, telephone calls late at night, turning up at her house and setting up a dating profile in her name. The applicant's ex-partner became fearful in her own home, keeping doors locked and curtains closed. The indicted period was August 2024 to March 2025.

The applicant was aged 37 at sentence. He had two convictions for four offences from July to September 2017 including three breaches of a non-molestation order obtained against him by his now ex-partner.

There was a pre-sentence report in which the author drew attention to the applicant's disregard for court orders, giving as examples the breaches of non-molestation order in 2017 and more recent breaches of bail. The applicant was assessed as posing a high risk of "domestically abusive behaviour" to his ex-partner and a medium risk to any future partner and his children.

There were two victim personal statements from the ex-partner. We have read all this material carefully.

"I am not here to sentence you for conduct that took place then but it is undeniably a background against which she was abused in this way."

Having set out the nature of the stalking behaviour for which the applicant was to be sentenced, the judge placed the offending in category B culpability and category 1 harm. He concluded that harm was in the highest category, referencing the level of distress evident from the partner's most recent victim personal statements. He rejected Mr Lara's suggestions made to him that harm fell into category 2. The judge noted that the offence was aggravated by multiple culpability factors and "to a degree" by previous convictions. In addressing mitigation the judge referred to character references and to remorse expressed by the applicant in a letter to the court.

The judge took a notional sentence after trial of 40 months to which he applied a reduction of 20 per cent for guilty plea, arriving at the sentence of two years and eight months to which we have referred.

Mr Lara, who appears pro bono to assist us on this renewal, in the best traditions of the Bar and for which we are grateful, raises a single ground of appeal. He says that the judge erred in placing harm into the highest category. He argues that the judge wrongly relied on information in a victim personal statement which the parties had agreed was essentially inadmissible at sentence. Had it not been uploaded to DCS, Mr Lara says, then the judge would not have had the background to the relationship and would have assessed the harm differently. He says that the global harm is to be distinguished from the harm caused by the indicted behaviour which took place over just a few months at the end of a 20-year relationship.

In his written advice accompanying the grounds Mr Lara raised as a further ground his contention that the judge had no expert evidence which could underpin a conclusion that the partner had sustained very severe distress or psychological injury and that the judge had erred in making that finding.

The prosecution have put in a Respondent's Notice which we have read.

The guideline provides that category 1 harm is indicated by "very serious distress caused to the victim, significant psychological harm caused to the victim, victim caused to make considerable changes to lifestyle to avoid contact". In our view the judge was entitled to take into account the background as related by the complainant which was relevant when assessing the impact of the indicted behaviour upon her. She was an already vulnerable victim, made so by her experience of living in that relationship. As the judge pointed out, he was not sentencing the applicant for that background but for the impact of the stalking behaviour upon someone who had lived through those background events. We note that the case was opened on the basis that the applicant was jealous and verbally abusive at times whilst also being loving at other times. No complaint was made about characterising the relationship in that way at the time. Whether or not specific events referred to by the complainant in fact happened, it was the case that she manifested as a deeply vulnerable person upon whom the stalking behaviour acted to cause severe distress.

In R v Chall [2019] EWCA Crim 865 the then Vice President of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, Holroyde LJ giving the judgment of the court made it clear that expert evidence was not required before a judge could conclude that significant psychological harm had been caused, emphasising that the assessment of level of harm was for the judge to make on the evidence. The two recent victim personal statements which we have read, taken together with the nature of the behaviour itself, in our view provided ample evidence of very serious distress caused to an already vulnerable woman sufficient to place harm into category 1.

For these reasons, the application for leave to appeal is refused.