Lord Beith
Main Page: Lord Beith (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Beith's debates with the Attorney General
Ian Tomlinson
Lord Beith Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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The Attorney-General
I certainly endorse the hon. Lady’s final comment. Yes, and I hope I made it clear that there is something profoundly unsatisfactory about a conflict of evidence arising on facts and matters of this kind. Some matters the hon. Lady raises are not within my province, but there may well be some lessons to be learned, and as I indicated previously, this matter is at least not yet completely at an end. That having been said, prosecutors have to see that the law is observed, but they have to act within the law and on the evidence. They are constrained by that; indeed, that is one of their responsibilities and duties. The fact that the evidence ends up unsatisfactory and that the matter cannot therefore be taken any further does not mean that they have not done their job properly.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
Does the Attorney-General accept that, whatever may be the normal practice, there was nothing to prevent the CPS from bringing a simple assault charge while other matters continued to be investigated? Does he also recognise that the urgency of creating a system of genuinely independent medical examiners, as recommended after the Shipman case and by the Justice Committee, is confirmed by aspects of this case?
The Attorney-General
The right hon. Gentleman raises the question of whether an assault charge could have been brought while the investigation continued. I say simply that it could have been. The difficulty that might have arisen is that if that assault charge had been taken to conclusion through the courts during the period of the investigation and subsequently the material on which a manslaughter charge could have been based became apparent, it might then have been impossible to proceed with the manslaughter charge. I do not think that that matter can simply be overlooked.
I did not fully respond to the point put by the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) about the timing. I simply say this: there was an IPCC inquiry first of all, which took some months. By the time the Crown Prosecution Service got the material in this case, time had already gone on a fair bit. In those circumstances, I do not take the view from what I have seen that the CPS was in any way dilatory in trying to bring this matter to a conclusion.