Reliance on sentencing precedents
The case of Shah v General Pharmaceutical Council (formerly Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain) [2011] EWHC 73 (Admin) underlines the dangers of relying uncritically on earlier decisions. In that case the appellant sought to quash an order requiring the registrar to remove his name from the register on the basis that it was inconsistent with earlier reported decisions of the panel.Wyn Williams J concluded that the statutory committee was wholly justified in concluding that the significance of the previous decisions was limited. He held that: ‘There is nothing within the reports of the cases relied upon by (counsel) which suggests that they form part of a coherent body of consistent jurisprudence. There is no suggestion in any of the cases, for example, that later cases rely upon the earlier ones; there is no suggestion in the reports that the sanction of reprimand was imposed because that was some kind of norm in the circumstances revealed in the cases in question.’
Categories: 6th edition, Chapter 14, updates