John Stephenson (judge)

Sir John Frederick Eustace Stephenson (28 March 1910 – 1 November 1998) was an English barrister and judge, a Lord Justice of Appeal from 1971 until his retirement in 1985 and a member of the Privy Council.

In 1940 he was attached to the War Office and was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, in which he was a captain in 1943, promoted Major in 1944 and Lieutenant-Colonel in 1946, serving in the Middle East and North West Europe.

[4] In the case of R v Collins (1972) in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, Stephenson and Lord Justice Edmund-Davies considered the meaning of "enters as a trespasser" in the definition of burglary.

The Appellant, Collins, was a nineteen-year-old who had been convicted at the Essex Assizes of burglary with intent to commit rape and had been sentenced to twenty-one months' imprisonment.

After an evening's drinking he had climbed a ladder wearing nothing but his socks and was about to enter a young woman's bedroom when she woke, saw him in the moonlight on her window-sill with an erect penis, thought he was her boyfriend coming to pay her a romantic call, and invited him in.

He feared that the documents would be used "not for legitimate purposes of the action but for harassment of individual patients, informants and renegades named in them, not only by proceedings for defamation against them but by threats and blackmail".