| The Honourable Mr Justice Treacy |
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|---|---|
| Judge of the High Court of Justice |
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| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office 2002 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born | Colman Maurice Treacy 28 July 1949 |
| Spouse(s) | Jane Hooper |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Judge |
| Profession | Barrister |
Sir Colman Maurice Treacy, The Hon. Mr Justice Treacy, (born 28 July 1949), is a judge of the High Court of England and Wales sitting in the Queen's Bench Division. Prior to this he was a distinguished criminal practitioner in Birmingham, and he is President of the Birmingham Law Society. He has presided over a number of notable criminal trials, including those of Afghan warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, and two of the killers of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager killed in a race hate attack in South East London in 1993.
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Treacy attended Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit independent boarding school in the Ribble Valley, Lancashire, and and studied Classics on an Open Scholarship at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1971, and appointed Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1990.
Treacy practised mainly in criminal law and became a leading figure in the criminal courts of Birmingham.[1] In 2002, he prosecuted two suspected Islamic terrorists accused of plotting to cause terrorist explosions in the UK, before Mr Justice Hughes.[2] One of the accused, Moinul Abedin, was convicted and sentenced to twenty years, while the other was acquited.[3] He was appointed Assistant Recorder in 1988 and Recorder in 1991, a post he retained until his appointment to the High Court in 2002, becoming The Honourable Mr Justice Treacy and being knighted by the Queen. From 2006 to 2010, he was the Presiding Judge of the Midland Circuit. He is now a member of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales.
Treacy has had an eventful career at the High Court, presiding over a number of high profile criminal trials. In 2005, he presided at the trial of Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, an Afghan warlord charged under the principle of universal jurisdiction with conspiracy to torture and conspiracy to take hostages during the 1990s in Afghanistan, for which Zardad was sentenced to twenty years in prison and recommended to be deported.[4] On sentencing notorious Nottingham gang boss Colin Gunn to thirty-five years for conspiracy to murder the parents of a gangland rival, Gunn told him to "die of AIDS".[5]
In 2010, he was the presiding judge at the first major English criminal trial in over four hundred years to be heard without a jury.[6][7] The decision by the Court of Appeal to allow the trial to proceed without a jury came after the third attempt at a trial fell apart due to alleged jury tampering.[8] The decision was criticised by Shami Chakrabarti, Director of pressure group Liberty.[8] The case was also notable for its subject matter, the £1.7 million robbery of the Menzies World Cargo warehouse at Heathrow airport in February 2004, of which all four accused were convicted.[9] The trial reportedly cost £25,000,000.[10]
In December 2011, Treacy presided over the trial of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the racially agravated murder of Stephen Lawrence.[1][11] The black teenager had been killed whilst waiting at a bus stop in Eltham, South East London, in April 1993, by a gang of white youths chanting racist slogans. Five men had been arrested and two were charged but the prosecution was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service due to lack of evidence. A private prosecution by the Lawrence Family in 1994 of three of the suspects resulted in their acquittal due to unreliability of the identification evidence. The 1999 Macpherson Review of the case found serious shortcomings in the original Metropolitan Police investigation and concluded that the force was "institutionally racist." It also recommended a reduction in double jeopardy, the rule preventing someone being tried for the same crime twice, to allow for cases where "fresh and viable" new evidence became available to be retried. This proposal was supported by the Law Commission in 2001 and given effect by Parliament in the Criminal Justice Act 2003.
In 2011, eighteen years after the incident, a cold case review found new DNA evidence using techniques not available at the time of the original investigation. Dobson and Norris were prosecuted in December that year and convicted on 3 January 2012, being ordered to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure with minimum terms of fifteen years and two months and fourteen years and three months respectively.[12]