03/02/2020 Stocker v Stocker [2019] UKSC 17 (3 April 2019) hand around her neck. Unsurprisingly, he was content to go along with a suggestion put to him by a police officer that he had not “maliciously grabbed her around the throat or tried to assault her”. 11. At no point did Mr Stocker claim that he had grasped his wife by the throat in order to secure his hand covering her mouth or to prevent her from wrenching free from his grasp. Nor did he suggest that he could not have prevented her from shouting simply by placing his hand over her mouth. It is to be noted that he had admitted to police that he had alighted from the stool or chair. If that statement was accurate and truthful, he was therefore on the same level as his wife. Yet, the judge rejected Mr Stocker’s evidence that he had simply put his hand over his wife’s mouth. Mitting J considered that a further hand (on the neck) was needed to secure the grip on Mrs Stocker’s mouth. This conclusion seems to have been premised on Mr Stocker remaining on the chair. (And, in fairness to the judge, it seems that Mr Stocker so claimed in evidence.) 12. If other considerations had not supervened, there might well have been an issue as to whether it was open to the judge to reach the conclusion which he did, particularly because that conclusion is more benevolent to Mr Stocker than any version of the facts which he could reasonably have advanced. It seeks to explain the red marks on a basis which Mr Stocker has never argued for. In the event, however, it is unnecessary to deal with that matter because of the conclusions that I have reached on other issues and, since it had not been argued that the judge’s finding on this point was one which he should not have made, I say nothing more about it. 13. The judge began his discussion about the meaning to be given to the statements said to be defamatory by referring to the well-known case of Jeynes v News Magazines Ltd [2008] EWCA Civ 130 and cited the eight propositions made in that case by Sir Anthony Clarke MR in para 14. The judge also quoted the supplementary qualification to those propositions provided by Sharp LJ in Rufus v Elliott [2015] EWCA Civ 121, para 11. (Both authorities will be considered below.) 14. Having considered these judicial pronouncements, Mitting J said that he did not understand that either authority indicated that, in order “to confirm the meaning in ordinary usage of a single English word”, it was impermissible to refer to “an authoritative English dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary.” He then referred to the two dictionary definitions which I have set out at para 7 above and continued at para 36: “If the defendant had said ‘he strangled me’, the ordinary reader would have understood her to have used the word in the second sense for the obvious reason that she was still alive. But the two Facebook comments cannot have been understood to refer to ‘trying’ to strangle her in that sense because, as she said, the police had found handprints on her neck. These could only have been caused by the painful constriction of her neck or throat. If understood in that sense, she could not have been taken to have said that the defendant had tried to strangle her because he had succeeded. The ordinary reader would have understood that the defendant had attempted to kill her by external compression of her throat or neck with his hands and/or fingers.” 15. It is clear from this passage of his judgment that the trial judge had confined the possible meaning of the statement, “he tried to strangle me” to two stark alternatives. Either Mr Stocker had tried to kill his wife, or he had constricted her neck or throat painfully. In the judge’s estimation, the https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2019/17.html 4/16