Unfit to Plead, Locked in Legal Limbo: Guernsey’s Tough Call

Welcome to the Deep Dive. In this episode we open on a courtroom in Guernsey where the law itself is the headline — old, creaking, and suddenly dangerous to liberty. At the centre of the story is William King, a defendant found unfit to plead. The familiar machinery of criminal justice grinds to a halt because human rights law — Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights — will not allow someone to be deprived of their liberty without a lawful basis tied to proven conduct. The clash is immediate: a 1961 law points to indefinite detention at His Majesty’s Pleasure, but sending someone away forever before the facts are established would violate the right the island swore to protect.

What follows is a rare judicial workaround that reads like a legal thriller. The ordinary court suspends any DHMP decision and summons the full court for a single, focused mission: find the facts. On July 24, 2024, the full court does just that — not to convict, but to determine whether Mr. King committed the acts alleged. The court’s findings are stark and harrowing: false imprisonment and sexual assault arising from an incident when King, acting as an unlicensed taxi driver, drove a highly intoxicated woman for two and a half hours, parked at I-Cart, and left her in circumstances that supported both the sexual assault and the restraint findings. The evidence was more than testimony — CCTV, phone-location data and distressing dashcam audio captured screams that the judge described as harrowing.

But findings are not convictions. That distinction is the legal lifeline that preserves the defendant’s rights while allowing the state to assess risk. To decide what protection the public needed, experts were called in. A probation report using the RSVPV2 tool described a high risk of serious sexual harm and recommended off-island, secure treatment; a consultant psychiatrist described the risk as moderate but made a decisive caveat — the higher risk opinion was justified if strong mitigations were not available. Both experts agreed on one thing: treatment and tight management were essential.

With the 1961 framework unusable for preventive detention, the court turned to more modern tools. Judges invoked the Sexual Offences (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law 2013 and, crucially, certified that the false imprisonment finding was sexually aggravated because it was part and parcel of the same incident that produced the sexual assault finding. That certification allowed the court to base a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO) on both findings, even though there was no criminal conviction.

The SOPO the court fashioned is comprehensive and intrusive by design — a narrow but firm instrument intended to protect the public and to manage risk. It bans private vehicles with any female unless the person is his mother or probation gives express prior approval; it prohibits unsupervised contact (direct or indirect) with any female under 16; it requires all internet-capable devices to be approved by probation and forbids deleting browsing or call histories; it mandates residence at an approved address, advance notice and approval for work, and compulsory attendance at psychiatric and offending-behaviour programmes. The order is set for five years, and for those five years the notification rules that normally follow a conviction apply.

The episode closes on a sharp judicial observation: this was a stopgap born of necessity. The Royal Court recorded that the 1961 law is in urgent need of reform. The narrative leaves listeners with two vivid truths — the state must protect the public, but it must do so within the strictures of human rights; when statute lags, judges sometimes must build bridges to keep both duties. This case is a study in balancing liberty and safety, judicial creativity and legislative responsibility — and a call to lawmakers to fix the gaps so future cases won’t require such high-wire solutions.