PC to be prosecuted for manslaughter

In a brave decision, Tim Owen QC has advised the CPS and Keir Starmer in particular that PC Harwood should be prosecuted for manslaughter over the death of Ian Tomlinson.  I say brave as they may both now find themselves facing the ire of police officers across the country.

I am not quite sure that Keir Starmer meant when he said that the inquest had allowed "a degree of clarity to emerge" regarding the medical evidence.  It sounds as though he is saying that the medical evidence wasn't clear when the CPS took their original decision not to prosecute.  If that is the case it rather beggars the question: "Why didn't they CPS seek clarification prior to making the original decision?"

Comments

  1. phisheep24 May 2011 at 16:09

    There were bound to be a few weasel words in the CPS statement, since it pretty well shows that the original decision not to prosecute was wrong. What Starmer failed to mention is that the medical evidence was 'clarified' as he puts it, by questioning, in public and in front of a jury - which after all is the usual and proper way of clarifying evidence and why charges should have been preferred first time round.

    Ah well, the CPS got there in the end.

    As to the ire of police officers, I don't see why there should be any. I guess there will be a few 'but for the grace of God' moments - but if any officer thinks they should be beyond the law when it comes to unprovoked assaults on innocent civilians they deserve a bit of a shake-up. Judging by the testimony of other officers at the inquest I would not expect much in the way of a backlash.

    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 ...
More gibberish >>

Is there twice as much violent crime in the UK versus the USA?

Image
The tweet from Charlie Kirk I came across a screenshot of a Twitter post while on Facebook this morning. The original post now has 11,000 retweets and 23,000 likes on Twitter. As you can see from the picture somebody called Charlie Kirk, who is a right-wing American commentator, claims that there are 933 violent crimes in the UK per 100,000 people. This is more than double the rate he claims for the USA where he says there are only 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The UK doesn’t feel that violent to me, so is it true? We’re all gonna die According to the FBI, in 2016 there were 1,248,185 violent crimes committed across the whole of the USA. That is an increase of 4.1% on the 2015 figure but still represented only 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 people . So, Mr Kirk appears to be slightly overestimating the violent crime in the USA. I should say that I am using the 2016 figures as those are the latest available on the FBI website, so maybe he has slightly differe...
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 >>