Hundreds of sex cases reviewed after ANOTHER police evidence blunder
... and astonishingly it involves the same detective responsible for student’s rape trial collapse
‘The cult of victimhood’
SCOTLAND Yard is to review hundreds of rape, child abuse and sexual assault cases after a second prosecution collapsed in a week due to an evidence blunder.
Isaac Itiary, who was charged with the rape of a child under 16, was told he would face no further action yesterday after his case was reviewed in the wake of last week’s scandal.
Incredibly, his prosecution involved the same officer as the Liam Allan case, which collapsed last Thursday when it emerged he had failed to disclose thousands of damning text messages. The detective constable in question, Mark Azariah, is still working at Scotland Yard’s sexual offences unit and has not been suspended.
Last night, amid mounting calls for an independent inquiry, the Metropolitan Police announced that every live case being investigated by its Child Abuse and Sexual Offences squad was now being reviewed to ensure that all digital evidence has been properly examined, documented and shared.
The flawed prosecutions have prompted fears there have been miscarriages of justice – but also raise the prospect that rapists and child abusers could go free if they are able to challenge disclosure of evidence at their trial.
Mr Itiary’s case collapsed at Inner London Crown Court yesterday afternoon after the Crown Prosecution Service decided to offer no evidence.
Police said they had been ‘working closely with the CPS to progress the investigation and provide full disclosure’. However, the day after Mr Allan’s trial collapsed, a review was ordered which ‘resulted in the identification of relevant material which was passed to the CPS to disclose’. A CPS spokesman said: ‘Prosecutors decided that there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction and we offered no evidence against the defendant at a hearing today.’
Last night Commander Richard Smith, who oversees the Met’s rape investigations, said: ‘I completely understand that this case may raise concerns given the backdrop of the case of [Mr Allan] last week.
‘The Met is completely committed to understanding what went wrong and is carrying out a joint review with the CPS, the findings of which will be published. Rape investigations are by their nature very complex, and often hinge on the contradictory accounts of the alleged suspect and the complainant about what has taken place.
‘We are reviewing all our investigations where we are in discussion with the CPS, to assure ourselves that we are meeting our disclosure obligations in an acceptable timescale based on the volume of data that some cases involve.’
Last week DC Azariah, 37, was accused of ‘sheer incompetence’ by prosecutor Jerry Hayes after failing to hand over 40,000 text and WhatsApp messages which proved the innocence of Mr Allan. The 22-year-old student, accused of six counts of rape, spent almost two years on bail and three days in the dock at Croydon Crown Court before his trial was dramatically halted by a judge when it emerged that his accuser had sent hun- dreds of messages to friends describing her rape fantasies.
DC Azariah had claimed the phone records were ‘too personal’ to share, and only did so when a new prosecutor took on the case demanded the evidence.
Yesterday Mr Allan’s solicitor Simone Meerabux said: ‘I think that someone should look back at all the Met cases and look at the reviewing lawyer who looked at the cases involving this officer. I really don’t think that the CPS can put the blame on this one officer, I know reviewing lawyers aren’t doing their jobs.
‘I do not think that the Met can investigate themselves, nor the CPS investigate themselves, it must be an independent inquiry.’
Conservative MP Bob Neill, chairman of the Justice select committee, said: ‘ This is an extremely troubling development. It rather confirms the view that this was not a one-off mistake. I think there are deep-seated failure of disclosure by both the police and the CPS.
‘There also needs to be a very swift inquiry into this officer’s conduct and suitability for being involved in these rape investigations. After making two errors of this gravity he should not be involved in any more active investigations until we find out what has gone wrong.’
Mr Neill said Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders, who has pushed to increase rape prosecutions and convictions, must ‘urgently’ review communication failures between the police and CPS on handing over sensitive material.
‘I don’t know if this officer is not up to scratch, but the CPS needs to realise that if it can’t depend on the police to carry out thorough checks of the evidence then prosecution lawyers have got to be more proactive,’ he said.
‘It is not good enough to see that this mistake was not a oneoff. We have got to make sure that it is not happening in any other cases. Every case this officer has been involved in needs to be looked at again.’
David Green of think-tank Civitas, a former adviser to the Government, said: ‘There is a wider problem that the justice system and the police have lost their way because of the cult of victimhood and the prevailing idea that the victim should always be believed. That is leading to these grave injustices.’