Not enough cash to charge suspects

Before a suspect is interviewed the police will usually disclose the basic facts of a case to the suspect's solicitor, which is one of the best reasons for having a solicitor by the way!

There are rumours flying about that the CPS are refusing to authorise charges of suspects because of budget constraints - I most recently heard this the weekend before last at a party from a Met police officer and again last Friday from a BTP police officer at a Chas and Dave concert (I have high musical tastes!)

Consider this piece of disclosure in a theft case, "LBH have produced CCTV evidence which shows the offence... The defendant is currently on bail for two like offences... [and] has 14 previous convictions for theft offences..."  The disclosure also makes the point that a CCTV operator witnessed the offence as it happened, which is how the police came to be called.

I cannot comment about whether the CPS are deliberately refusing to charge, but in this case the CPS refused to charge and the matter was "no further actioned".

Comments

  1. Anonymous17 March 2011 at 18:30

    I think the clue is in "currently on bail for two like offences".

    There seems to be a school of thought that here that there's no point throwing good money after bad when the scrote is in the middle of a prosecution for the same thing.

    On a seperate note....how is it that Human Rights lawyers have not jumped on the fact that justice is routinely denied to victims ? You would think there was some sort of conspiracy here.

    Ho hum...civil war is getting closer every day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Defence Brief18 March 2011 at 08:51

    I didn't say but the bail was police bail, so no prosecution ongoing.

    Contrary to poplar belief, lawyers do not exist in a vacuum so for a lawyer to jump on anything they need a member of the public to instruct them to bring the action. There was a case brought in the late 80s by the family of one of the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper in which the family said the police had failed to protect the individual victims. The court effectively said that the police did not owe a duty of care to every individual against a particular offender. I suspect that if someone sued for the authorities failing to protect victims the outcome would be similar.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are items referred to in s.9’s as exhibits bound to be served?

  Background - CPS served a witness statement on me that exhibited two BWV clips that are potentially relevant to the Crown’s case and may have some relevance to the defence case insofar as they are likely to show the lighting and weather at the time events happened. Somebody has listed the clips as unused material rather than putting them in the exhibits folder that accompanies the served evidence. This raised an interesting (to me anyway) question about whether a party who exhibits an item in a statement is bound to serve it on their opponent. At court the judge took the view that the Crown were at liberty to classify items exhibited in s9s as unused material if they chose not to rely upon them in evidence. I took the view that if they are exhibited then they must be served along with the witness statement that exhibits the item and that the solution to a situation where the Crown say they are now unused is to edit the witness statement to remove the reference, by agreement with the
More gibberish >>

Driving without insurance

Image
Insurance is a contract that remains in force until it expires or is cancelled As you may, or may not, know I specialise in motoring law and most of my work involves defending people accused of drink driving . With the drink driving often come other road traffic offences such as driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. It’s driving without insurance I want to talk about today because I think far too many police officers, solicitors, barristers and judges miss a key legal point when looking at these cases. I’ve received prosecution papers today for somebody accused of driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. The no insurance element is claim that the suspect did not tell the insurer about the disqualification. In his statement, the police officers says, “ [I] contacted [the insurer] who called me back informing me they would not consider the insurance policy valid as there were no convictions disclosed.” Looks like an open an
More gibberish >>

National Identity Cards

Image
A mock up of a British National Identity Card Following the Second World War, Britain called for help from the people of the Commonwealth to come and fill thousands of job vacancies. Many answered the call and came to be known as the Windrush Generation after named the MV Empire Windrush, which docked in Tilbury on the 22 nd June 1948 bringing the first workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago. The Home Office inevitably screwed up and caused a huge number of problems for members of the Windrush Generation. But their story is not the subject of this blog. Instead, I want to look at a side issue that has raised its weary head once again: ID cards. Alan Johnson and Charles Clarke, both former Home Secretaries, have begun a call for ID cards as the solution to the troubles of undocumented British citizens who have not had their status regularised. ID cards pop up every few years and I’ve no doubt that eventually we’ll have a compulsory piece of plastic foisted upon us that
More gibberish >>