False allegations: a short case study

Justice: weeding out the truth from the lies... well trying to at least


When we think of false allegations the thing that comes to mind, for me at least, is rape.  Everything about sexual offences is controversial.  There are people who believe that false rape allegations are rife and their polar opposites who cannot accept that anybody would ever lie about such a thing.  For what it’s worth, I fall in the middle.  I know that some people lie about being the victim of sexual offences (and all sorts of other offences for that matter) and I also think that most complainants are honest. 

When I say I know some people make false complaints I mean I have acted in two cases where I have no doubt at all that false allegations of sexual assaults were made – I’ve also acted in far more where I believed every word spoken by the victim(s).  But, today’s blog isn’t about sex (sorry if that disappoints you); today is about a false allegation of another type.

I recently advised a man who I am very confident had been the victim of a false allegation that he held a knife to the throat of a woman and threatened to kill her.  The complainant named the suspect saying that she had known him for many years as a neighbour, albeit that they had not had contact for nearly a decade.

Why do I say that this was a false allegation?  Well for a start he had an alibi and not one from his mum!  His alibi is that he was home awaiting a delivery and the delivery slot has been confirmed by the delivery company.  My second reason is that the complainant has made multiple false allegations against this man in the past and has been convicted of wasting police time after she falsely claimed he had a gun, causing armed police to kick in the door of the home he shares with his partner and children.

The frustrating thing is that there isn’t very much the police can do to help this man.  As the officer said, the police cannot prove conclusively that the allegation is malicious.  It’s possible that it did happen and the suspect is very convincing; it’s also possible that it never happened.  It might even be that it did happen by the complainant really was threatened but misidentified the suspect.  The police just cannot prove it one way or another.


As a police officer once told me, “people make false complaints to us all the time”.  The real problem for everyone (because any of us might receive a letter on Monday morning requiring us to attend court to sit on a jury) is separating the false complaints from the genuine.
Location: Richmond, Richmond, Greater London TW9 1RB, UK

Comments

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 >>