The sole point of this website is to provide information to anyone in the future that is appealing to the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) to argue the grounds for having a Brown Direction in self-defence where both limbs are used. When this ground is answered, this website will be repurposed into a general self-defence website.
The Court of Appeal made it clear that it was a fundamental principle that in arriving at their verdict, the jury, even if they had not agreed as to part of the evidence, had to be unanimous that each ingredient necessary to constitute the offence had been established. This was established in R v Brown (1984) 79 Cr App R 115. R v Williams [2012] EWCA Crim 2516 Lord Justice Treacy observed a relevant judgement in R v Keeton [1995] 2 Cr App R 241 on page 249G was stated at [54] : "...it is only in cases where truly alternative bases for a finding of guilt are being put forward by the Crown and where there is a risk that the jury might feel that it is permissible for some of them to be satisfied by one basis and others by another, that the Brown direction need be given. It is not appropriate to complicate what are essentially straightforward cases with a Brown direction."
In self-defence, the jury could only convict a defendant if either they did not believe his evidence that he was acting in self-defence(first limb) or they thought that the defendant had used an unreasonable amount of force (second limb). These were issues which were ideally suited to a decision of a jury. In R v Crawford[2001] EWCA Crim 543 the second issue did not arise because the prosecution and the defence agreed that if Mr Crawford had a honest belief to use force, then the force he used was reasonable. This, by contrast to R. v Integrity [2024] EWCA Crim 620 where there was no agreement between the prosecution and the defence. Without the Brown direction or the need for the jury to agree on an issue or route to verdict, we cannot be sure that the jury verdict on self-defence would necessarily have been the same. It is possible that the individual jury members could've aggregated the split votes of their body, if perchance some only (less than a required majority) were satisfied of any such route to guilt. From a technical standpoint, in R v Crawford there was only one route to verdict. In R. v Integrity there were two routes to the verdict. The court of Appeal has not addressed this point of law if the jury are the jury entitled to agree or not to any route of a verdict.