“Here we go again…again” Bartholomew Dalton on another prison habeas corpus scandal

Senior Associate Bartholomew Dalton has written for Criminal Law Week about the disturbing case of an 18-year-old remand prisoner who was held unlawfully in prison for six days after he should have been released.

The applicant should have been released immediately from HMP Thameside having been sentenced, on a Friday afternoon, to a detention and training order. However, he was not released until the following Thursday after he had applied for a writ of habeas corpus.

Comparing the prison’s response to the similar, earlier cases of Kim (in which Bartholomew represented the applicant) and Niagui, the court concluded that it was “impossible to conclude anything other than that there were a series of failings in the way in which the Defendant responded to the order requiring the release of the Claimant.”

“[T]he evidence […] strongly suggests a lack of understanding by the prison staff of the fundamental principles set out in Niagui […] repeated in Kim […] to the effect that no-one can be detained without lawful authority and that it was for the prison to show that such an authority existed. Nor was there any sense of urgency in their actions.”

Bartholomew references his own, earlier analysis of 2025’s Bashir case (also in Criminal Law Week), and writes: “Here we go again! This is now the fourth reported case in less than four years, all with strikingly similar fact patterns.

“But for a lack of a breach of writ of habeas corpus in this instance, the above comments apply equally to the instant case and it appears that the lessons of therelatively well publicised previous cases have fallen on deaf ears, yet again.”

The full article is available to Criminal Law Week subscribers here.