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Perverting the course of justice is a common law offence, triable on indictment only in the Crown Court, and it carries a maximum of life imprisonment. It also catches a particular kind of person: someone who was never guilty of the thing they were first accused of, and who then did something clumsy while trying to clear their name. This is a plain-English account of the three elements, where the line falls between defending yourself and interfering with the fairness of investigation, and why being cleared of the original allegation does not always close the file.
There is no Act of Parliament that creates this offence. It is a common law offence, developed by the courts, and its elements are correspondingly broad.
A person commits it where there is:
Two features of that structure decide many cases.
The second element is a tendency, not a result. The prosecution does not have to prove that any investigation was actually deflected, that any officer was actually misled, or that any outcome actually changed. Conduct capable of perverting the course of justice, done with that intention, completes the offence, even where it failed entirely and was seen through immediately.
People find this very hard to accept. The instinct is that a clumsy, unsuccessful attempt that fooled nobody cannot be a serious criminal offence. Legally, it is the same offence.
The course of justice must be in existence or in contemplation. Proceedings need not have been issued. An investigation need not even have begun, so long as one is in contemplation at the time of the act.
That is the point most people miss, and it is where the exposure sits for anyone who acts in the hours after an accusation is first made to them privately. Deleting a conversation the moment somebody says they are going to the police is not conduct that precedes the course of justice. It is conduct in contemplation of it.
These allegations rarely involve anything as deliberate as the phrase suggests. The recognised categories are:
The last of those is the one that catches otherwise blameless people, and it is the subject of the next section.
Somebody accused of something they did not do has a powerful and entirely rational urge to sort it out. To ring the person and ask what on earth they are doing. To ask a friend who was there to confirm what happened. To find the messages that prove the point and get rid of the ones that look bad out of context.
The first two instincts are dangerous. The third is an offence.
The safe rule is narrow and it is worth stating plainly: say what you want about the allegation to your own lawyer, and say nothing at all to anybody connected with it. Everything useful that can be done with witnesses and material can be done properly, through a solicitor, in a form that helps rather than compounds.
A person can be told that no further action is being taken on the original allegation and still face investigation for perverting the course of justice while it was live and ongoing. The two matters are entirely separate. The first collapsing does not carry the second with it.
This is the part that surprises people most. They are relieved that the allegation has gone, they assume the whole episode is closed, and they discover that the deleted messages or the phone call to a witness have become a file of their own, on an offence considerably more serious than the one they were originally suspected of.
It works in the other direction too, which is why the no further action decision is worth securing properly rather than passively. The way an investigation ends shapes what happens next.
Where the original allegation is a historic sexual offence allegation, the risk is higher still, because the events are old, the documentary record is thin, and the temptation to go looking for people who were there is correspondingly strong.
Perverting the course of justice is triable only on indictment, so it is a Crown Court offence in every case, and the statutory maximum is life imprisonment.
The maximum is not the likely sentence, and the gap between the two is enormous. The Sentencing Council guideline, in force from 1 October 2023, sets an offence range running from a community order to seven years' custody. It applies to offenders aged 18 or over sentenced on or after that date, whenever the offence was committed.
The guideline sets three categories of culpability.
Where an offender's culpability falls is the single most consequential judgement in the case, and it is argued from the facts rather than assumed from the charge.
Harm is assessed in three categories, with category 1 the most serious. The factors that drive it are the distress caused to any innocent party and the impact on the administration of justice, which is why a case that led to an innocent person being arrested sits very differently from one that wasted police time and nothing more.
Culpability and harm combine to give an offence category, and each category has a corresponding starting point and a category range.
At the top, category A1 carries a starting point of four years' custody with a range of two to seven years. At the bottom, category C3 attracts a community order. Everything else sits between.
From the starting point the court moves up or down for aggravating and mitigating features. The ones that recur are previous convictions and criminal record, whether the conduct continued over a sustained period, whether there was substantial delay caused to proceedings, and the personal mitigation available to the individual.
Credit for early guilty plea is then applied, the totality principle is considered where there are other matters, and the court decides whether the sentence can be a community order, a suspended sentence, or must be an immediate custodial sentence. Ancillary orders may follow.
Custody is common. The offence attacks the administration of justice itself, and courts sentence it accordingly. That is precisely why the culpability argument is worth making properly and early.
The CPS deals with this area under its charging standard for public justice offences, and perverting the course of justice is the most serious of a group. Which one is charged makes an enormous difference, and it is a decision capable of being influenced by representations before it is taken.
Section 5(2) of the Criminal Law Act 1967 makes it an offence to cause wasteful employment of the police by knowingly making a false report. It is summary only, and the maximum is 26 weeks' custody and a fine at level 4. Prosecution requires the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The distinction between the two offences is one of substance rather than degree. Wasting police time is concerned with police time and resources. Perverting the course of justice is concerned with exposing a person to the risk of arrest, prosecution and wrongful conviction. Conduct that wasted police time without ever putting anybody at that risk is capable of being the lesser offence, and saying so, with the material to support it, is a real and frequently overlooked line of argument.
Perjury is a separate offence with its own elements and its own maximum, and it concerns false statements made on oath in judicial proceedings. It is not interchangeable with perverting the course of justice, and the two should not be conflated.
The practical point is the same in each case. The first thing to establish is which offence is actually contemplated, because the elements, the venue, the maximum and the available arguments all differ.
The work that matters most in this area happens before anybody is charged, and often before anybody realises there is a second investigation at all.
In practice that means establishing the sequence and timing of every relevant act, because the difference between conduct before and after the course of justice was in contemplation is frequently the whole case. It means evidencing the innocent explanation for a deletion or a message while the surrounding material still exists to support it. It means preparing properly for an interview under caution where the questions will be about intention rather than about the underlying allegation, and taking the practical steps that need taking beforehand.
Our pre-charge representation practice exists for exactly this moment: putting the analysis to the police or the CPS in writing before a charging decision is taken, while the account can still be evidenced rather than merely asserted. Where somebody has already been charged, the same analysis supports an application for the charging decision to be reviewed and the case discontinued, rather than waiting to win at trial. This forms part of our wider criminal defence work.
We do not wait to see what happens next. On this offence in particular, what happens next is usually decided by what was already in the file.
We offer confidential consultations, in person at our London offices or remotely by secure call. Initial enquiries are handled discreetly and quickly.
If you have been accused of something and you are wondering whether to contact the person who accused you, speak to us before you do anything at all. That single decision changes more cases than any other.
It is a common law offence committed where a person does an act, or a series of acts, which has a tendency to pervert the course of justice, intending that it should do so. Typical examples include destroying evidence, making a false allegation, assisting somebody to evade arrest, and interfering with a witness.
It is triable only on indictment and carries a maximum of life imprisonment. In practice, the sentencing guideline in force since 1 October 2023 sets an offence range from a community order to seven years' custody, with the seriousness of the underlying offence and the effect on any innocent person being the main drivers.
No. The test is whether the conduct had a tendency to pervert the course of justice. An attempt that failed completely, and that nobody was taken in by, still completes the offence if the intention was there.
Yes. The course of justice needs only to be in existence or in contemplation. Acting the moment somebody tells you they intend to go to the police can be enough.
No. A suspect is entitled to deny an allegation, to say nothing, and to put forward a positive account. The offence is concerned with interfering with the process, not with maintaining innocence.
This is the most dangerous thing a person under investigation can do, and it should not be done, directly or through anybody else. It converts one allegation into two, and the second is usually the more serious. Anything that genuinely needs to be communicated can be done properly through a solicitor.
Not necessarily. Conduct during an investigation is a separate matter with its own file. An allegation collapsing does not close an investigation into what was done while it was live.
It may well help, and it needs to be evidenced rather than asserted. The reason for a deletion, the timing of it, and what the material actually contained are all capable of being established, and they are easier to establish now than later. You can contact our team directly for a confidential discussion.
Lex Vindico Group is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. We represent individuals nationally across England and Wales in criminal, regulatory, and parallel-proceedings defence at every stage, and most decisively, at the pre-charge stage.
This article is written by Akram Mula, LLM, Solicitor Advocate and CPS-approved Prosecutor, founder of Lex Vindico Group. It is general legal information about a common law offence and its sentencing, not legal advice on any specific case. For advice on your specific circumstances, contact our team directly.
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