A barrister who was jailed for almost two years over the death of a pensioner and was later suspended from his profession can return to practice after winning a High Court appeal against the ban.
Hamish Hickey was completing the school run when his Volvo hit Michael Lupton’s Ford on a rural road near the village of Ampleforth in July 2022.
Mr Lupton, 85, died in August 2022, 19 days after the crash.
Hickey was jailed for 23 months at York Crown Court in November 2024 and disqualified from driving until September 2027, after admitting causing Mr Lupton’s death by dangerous driving, North Yorkshire Police said.
He was released on licence last August, but in November, a disciplinary tribunal suspended him from working as a barrister for professional misconduct until September 30 this year, when the custodial sentence expires.
Hickey, who has practised family law since becoming a barrister in 2008, challenged the decision at the High Court.
His lawyers told a hearing on Tuesday that the suspension was “clearly inappropriate” and that the tribunal did not take into account the “powerful” mitigating factors in the case.
Lawyers for the Bar Standards Board (BSB), which regulates barristers, told the hearing in London that the decision was “neither wrong nor unjust”.
Mrs Justice Dias ruled that the tribunal “erred in law and in principle” when suspending Hickey, and gave “no explanation of what it was trying to achieve” through the decision.
She said: “On an objective basis, the sanction imposed by the tribunal was clearly inappropriate, manifestly disproportionate and outside the bounds of what could have been imposed in this case.”
The judge ordered that Hickey face no separate penalty for the misconduct, meaning he can return to work.
‘Self-serving and wrong’
Hickey admitted one count of professional misconduct at the tribunal, which stated he “engaged in conduct which was likely to diminish the trust and confidence which the public places in him or in the profession”.
In its decision, the tribunal said that Hickey’s “bitter remorse is plain” but that public confidence in barristers would be “damaged” if he were not suspended until the end of his sentence.
But Marc Beaumont, for Hickey, told the High Court on Tuesday in written submissions that the tribunal’s understanding of “public confidence” was “subjective, self-serving and wrong”.
He said: “The prison sentence has been de facto ‘served’, as there is no prospect of a return to custody in the case of a barrister who is disqualified from driving and who has conducted himself impeccably and with dignity and respect throughout the affair.”
Philip Stott, for the BSB, said in written submissions that the tribunal’s reasoning was “entirely clear and wholly adequate”.
He said: “The tribunal recognised that it was required ‘to impose a sanction that is no more and no less than is just and proportionate in all the circumstances’, including the impact on the appellant.”
But Mrs Justice Dias said that while “nothing can take away from the grief and loss of Mr Lupton’s family”, the role of tribunals “is not to punish” and that the case was one of “tragedy, rather than deliberate conduct”.
