Misfeasance in public office

Akenzua and another v Secretary of State for the Home Department and another (CA TLR 30 October)

Delroy Samuel Denton entered this country from Jamaica and, using his brother’s passport, obtained permission to remain for six months. It was discovered that he was a man with a record of violent crime in Jamaica who had served a long sentence for armed robbery. It followed that he had no right to remain in the UK, but an immigration officer attached to a special operations unit at Scotland Yard arranged for Denton to become a police informer. He was bailed by, or with the agreement of, the police and released from detention by way of temporary admission to the UK. He supplied his handlers with important information on Yardie activity, but during this period he murdered Zena Laws. In an action by the administrators of the estate of Ms Laws alleging misfeasance in public office in not detaining Denton pending his removal from the UK, it was sufficient for the administrators to plead that the harm contemplated was either to a known victim or victims, or to one or more victims who would be unknown unless and until the expected harm happened. The decision in Three Rivers District Council v Governor and Company of the Bank of England (No 3) [2000] 2 WLR 1220 did not exclude an action where the predictable victim was neither an identifiable individual nor an identifiable group of individuals. If, in his period of arranged liberty, Denton killed someone by careless driving, no action of the present kind would lie, because the harm would not have been of the kind indicated by his known proclivities. If, by parity of reasoning, he committed a murder in circumstances in which the defendants knew or should have known he was likely to do so, the action might lie. What mattered was not the predictability of Denton killing the deceased, but the predictability of his killing someone.