Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

208 Legal History in the Making
his assistant's salary. 35 The evidence of this assistant, B.A. Sparks, was even
more damaging. He considered some two or three cases a day, the reading of
whose particulars would, he agreed, 'take [him] about a quarter of an hour to
read through from beginning to end' after which they would normally be sent
to the Treasury Solicitor for an opinion or action. 36 By contrast Stephenson's
evidence was both detailed and aggressive. 37 He first described the network
of agency arrangements and 'approved' prosecuting solicitors which he had
earlier established around the country, and the rigorous scale of costs which
he maintained. He went on to outline a scheme for amalgamation of the new
department with his own, complete in all respects except that of the name of
the combined Director and Treasury Solicitor. An independent Department
of Public Prosecutions was he declared 'a fifth wheel on the coach of Justice'. 38
His solution was one which the committee readily accepted and in the autumn
of 1884 it was incorporated in a further Prosecution of Offences Act.
This new Act not only effectively established Stephenson, the existing
Treasury Solicitor, as Director of Public Prosecutions but made a modest
attempt to define his additional powers. The Director became responsible
for the prosecution of all offences punishable by death, and for all those
offences which he had hitherto undertaken as Treasury Solicitor - effectively
for those which any independent authority thought too difficult to handle. To
murder cases were added coinage offences; bankruptcy offences and company
frauds referred by the Board of Trade; and a continuing volume of requests for
help from clerks to justices, coroners, police authorities and other government
departments. 39 The volume of work grew rapidly in the ever more regulated
life of late Victorian England and by 1908 it became necessary to reestablish
an independent Department of Public Prosecutions.
In 1880 Sir John Maule had reviewed fewer than 500 cases of which the
Treasury Solicitor prosecuted less than forty per cent. In 1899 the combined
department handled over 1300 cases and prosecuted 519. These included
fifteen murder cases and eight other offences against the person, including
three under the recent Criminal Law Amendment Act. 40 It prosecuted 116
currency offences on behalf of the Treasury and nineteen major frauds on
behalf of the Board of Trade. The balance of its work addressed an astonishing
mixture of corporate and private misconduct. Montgomery County Council
was prosecuted for offences against the Quarries Act of 1894, a ship's captain
for importing a parrot contrary to the Foreign Animals Order, two East
Europeans for incitement to murder the Emperor of Russia and a farmer for
35 Ibid., minute 1.
36 Ibid., minute 608.
37 Ibid., minute 209.
38 Ibid., minute 228.
39 E. Tindal Atkinson, 'The Department of Public Prosecutions', Canadian Bar Rev., xxii (1944),
416. 40 An early twentieth century Director of Public Prosecutions, Atkinson, noted how his department
began to take responsibility for sexual offences against children and young persons, where traditional
community attitudes remained more tolerant than the legal establishment.