R v Ghosh
The former two stage test for dishonesty, combining an objective and a subjective element, later replaced by the test in Ivey.
Facts
Mr Ghosh was a surgeon acting as a locum consultant in a hospital. He claimed fees for operations that had been performed by another surgeon or under the National Health Service. He was convicted of offences of deception. He argued that he believed he was entitled to the money, and that the jury should have been directed to consider his own standards of honesty.
Legal principle
The Court of Appeal upheld the convictions and set out a two stage test for dishonesty. First, the jury must decide whether, according to the ordinary standards of reasonable and honest people, what was done was dishonest. If it was not dishonest by those standards, the prosecution fails. If it was, the jury must then consider whether the defendant himself must have realised that what he was doing was dishonest by those standards. The second stage was criticised for allowing defendants with warped standards to escape liability. In Ivey v Genting Casinos the Supreme Court said that the second stage did not correctly represent the law, and the Court of Appeal confirmed this for criminal cases in R v Barton and Booth.
Related cases on theft, robbery, burglary and fraud
- Attorney General's Reference (No 1 of 1983) [1985] QB 182
- Corcoran v Anderton (1980) 71 Cr App R 104
- Ivey v Genting Casinos (UK) Ltd [2017] UKSC 67, [2018] AC 391
- Lawrence v Metropolitan Police Commissioner [1972] AC 626
- Oxford v Moss (1979) 68 Cr App R 183
- R v Barton and Booth [2020] EWCA Crim 575, [2021] QB 685
- R v Collins [1973] QB 100
- R v Gomez [1993] AC 442
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