Chloé Barton

e: Chloe.Barton@charterchambers.com

Year of Call: 2006

Affiliations: Howard League for Penal Reform

Specialist Areas: General Crime, Local Government Crime & Enforcement, Extradition

Chloé Barton joined Chambers after completion of her pupillage in February 2008 and is primarily a criminal defence practitioner.  She is also a Grade 1 prosecutor and prosecutes for Westminster City Council, represents appellants at the Criminal Injuries Compensation Appeals Panel and has undertaken two short secondments with the RCPO as well as a secondment with the SFO.

She has a particular interest in prisons, their history, and how they operate today and she is also a partner in campaigning for the NSPCC.

Areas in which she has particularly wide experience include:

General Crime
Local Government Crime & Enforcement
Extradition

She has worked as contract counsel with the RCPO.  In this capacity Chloé has been involved in drafting a report for the Attorney-General regarding the release of third-party data and has also been part of the Chambers Review team – reviewing tobacco smuggling cases where the wrong legislation may have been relied upon and confiscation orders wrongly made. More recently she was instructed by the Serious Fraud Office for a disclosure exercise which involved reviewing over one million pages of material, many which were subject to legal professional privilege.

Chloé has acted for appellants at the Criminal Injuries Compensation Appeals Panel where she represents those who wish to challenge decisions made by CICA in relation to financial awards made to those who have suffered injury as a result of a criminal act.

FRAUD
R v Iqbal – Leicester Crown Court (Stand-in Junior Counsel for 3 weeks on a VHCC case involving a large scale Government Individual Learning Account fraud)
R v Ladega – Southwark Crown Court (Junior Prosecution counsel to Thomas Buxton in a £1m benefit fraud)

OTHER
R v DS – Camberwell Green Youth Court (As a result of Counsel’s advice an educational psychologist was instructed to assess the defendant.  As a direct result of that report, which revealed that the defendant had an IQ of 40, Counsel was able to persuade the Crown to offer no evidence on charges of criminal damage, common assault and threatening behaviour)
R v Seyedi – Isleworth Crown Court (Possession with intent to supply Class C drugs. Defence of duress run for the period of the drug dealing which was 8 months)
Oji v CICA (Represented Mr Oji, the driver of the tube train on which Jean Charles De Menezes was shot, at his appeal against the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.  Mr Oji had been refused compensation as the Authority found that he was not directly injured as a result of a crime of violence.  This decision was overturned by the Appeals Panel and Mr Oji was awarded compensation for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that he suffered after the incident: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8080602.stm)
R v Chin – Isleworth Crown Court (Prosecution forced to offer no evidence in a false passport case when, after pressured by the defence for disclosure, information came to light that supported and corroborated the defendant’s case that she had been duped by a fraudulent solicitor into believing that she was entitled to a British passport)
R v KS – Manchester Minshull Street (Crown agreed to accept a basis of plea different to the other four co-defendants in a s.18 case where a shopkeeper’s hand was almost completely severed with a machete. The co-defendants received sentences of 5 ½ years each whilst KS received a sentence of 12 months.)
R v Hackshaw – Court of Appeal (Sentence of 6 months quashed and replaced with a sentence of 6 weeks)