R v JA – Reading Magistrates Court 2018 

The defendant was charged alongside two others with the theft of lead flashing. An independent eye-witness stated that they saw a man removing the flashing from the porch of a house and loading it into a van, in which sat two more men. The eye-witness provided the van’s registration details to the police. 20 minutes later, the van was caught on CCTV at a nearby scrap metal yard. Three men were seen unloading the flashing. The van was pulled over by police shortly after, and the defendant arrested. Hennessy and Hammudi successfully argued that the eye-witness evidence should be excluded as the police had failed to carry out a video identification parade to determine whether the defendant was one of the men the eye-witness had seen at the time of the original theft. The defendant was acquitted.