No gong for DPP, say men in rape trial farce
Honour would be a reward for failure, they claim
TWO men wrongly prosecuted for rape say the country’s top prosecutor must not be ‘rewarded for failure’ and given a damehood.
Alison Saunders, who is stepping down as Director of Public Prosecutions, has been accused over a series of rape cases that collapsed after the prosecution failed to disclose vital evidence.
All her predecessors at the Crown Prosecution Service have been honoured since its formation in 1880, but the men say recognising Mrs Saunders in the New Year Honours would send a disastrous message.
Her time in office was marked by a ‘series of catastrophic failures’ and so being given an honour would ‘call into question the integrity of the whole honours system’, they said.
In a letter to a newspaper, they wrote that, in some cases, the CPS took a ‘toxic convictions-at-anycost approach’ and ‘many lost jobs, homes and relationships’ as a result. ‘We were wronged by a justice system that was supposed to protect us,’ they added.
‘Such devastating failures cannot be allowed to ever happen again. That’s why – as victims – we say that the exception must be made to the “automatic gong principle” for Alison Saunders. Future directors of public prosecutions must know that wreaking such misery will have consequences for them. Ms Saunders must not be rewarded for failure.’
The comments were made in a letter to The Sunday Telegraph by Samuel Armstrong, 25, and Liam Allan, 23.
London student Mr Allan spent two years on bail accused of rape and sexual assault. His case collapsed last December, sparking a row over the failures by the authorities to disclose relevant information to defendants.
A detective was criticised for his handling of 57,000 messages found on the alleged victim’s phone, some of which fatally undermined the case.
‘Wreaking misery’
The texts included one to a friend saying: ‘It wasn’t against my will or anything.’ Another read: ‘You know it’s always nice to be sexually assaulted without breaking the law.’
Mr Armstrong, a former Tory MP’s aide, was cleared the same month of raping a parliamentary worker in a Palace of Westminster office.
Phone records revealed that hours after the alleged attack she had tipped off a newspaper to try to get a sympathetic account of her story published.
Defence lawyers had been kept waiting for months to see the vital records.
Mrs Saunders, who became DPP in 2013, earned £250,000 last year and leaves the CPS at the end of the month with a £1.8million pension pot.
She is taking up a job with a law firm.