Urgent probe into CPS over Nottingham deaths
THE Attorney General yesterday ordered a review of the decision to accept manslaughter pleas over the Nottingham triple stabbing.
Victoria Prentis has asked His Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate to examine prosecutors’ handling of Valdo Calocane – and how his victims’ families were consulted.
A court last week had accepted the 32-year-old’s guilty pleas to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Psychiatrists commissioned by the CPS and defence counsel agreed Calocane was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia when he knifed undergraduates Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and grandfather Ian Coates, 65, in a 95-minute rampage.
Mrs Prentis said the killings last June ‘horrified the country’ and acknowledged that the victims’ families ‘understandably want to understand what happened in this case’.
She added: ‘That’s why I have asked the inspectorate to carry out a prompt and thorough review of CPS actions.’
Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner Caroline Henry has also commissioned the College of Policing to carry out an independent review into the policing response surrounding the case.
After Calocane was given a hospital order at Nottingham Crown Court, Barnaby’s mother Emma Webber, 51, said families had not been consulted over the charges and felt ‘railroaded’ into accepting the decision.
Calocane had come to the attention of Nottinghamshire Police at least four times since
‘Families were railroaded’
2020 and the force had failed to act on an arrest warrant issued nine months before the killing spree.
Leicestershire Police has also admitted officers failed to arrest Calocane following an assault on two colleagues at a Kegworth warehouse five weeks before the killings. Mr Coates’s son James, 37, last night welcomed the reviews as ‘good news’ but added: ‘We still need a public inquiry.’
Rishi Sunak met James Coates alongside the parents of Barnaby and Grace at Downing Street on Monday and the Prime Minister said he told the families: ‘We will get answers.’
The CPS said it liaises with victims’ families throughout the legal process.