Issue 311  16th September 2023

Stephen Parkinson will be the new Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service the Attorney General has announced today. Rt Hon Victoria Prentis KC MP selected Mr Parkinson following an open and transparent competition. It is expected that he will take up the appointment from 1 November for an initial term of five years. He will succeed the outgoing DPP, Max Hill KC...

Stephen Parkinson is a practicing lawyer with a long and distinguished career which began in the CPS as a junior Prosecutor. He has most recently been Senior Partner at law firm Kingsley Napley LLP where he has represented a number of high-profile clients. His last 20 years as a defence lawyer have built on the skills and experience that he gained from his years working as a prosecutor, and he has developed an extensive practice advising on, or undertaking, investigations for organisations, companies and individuals which will be a strength in his role as DPP...

New legislation to address dangerous cycling offences is being considered by the Department for Transport, a justice minister has said. Last year, then-transport secretary Grant Shapps pledged to create a “death by dangerous cycling” law, which would have seen cyclists who killed people prosecuted in a similar way to motorists who caused death by dangerous driving. The announcement came four years after the Government ran a consultation on proposals for new offences of causing death or serious injury while cycling.

Speaking during justice questions, Edward Argar acknowledged current laws were “old” and that it could be “difficult to successfully prosecute offences”. He told MPs that Department for Transport (DfT) colleagues were considering bringing forward fresh legal provisions focused on addressing dangerous cycling behaviour. But he did not provide a time frame or reveal when such legislation would be introduced...

The head of the Metropolitan Police has called for ‘overdue’ reform of the criminal justice to end bureaucracy for his officers and ‘let the police police’. In conversation with Sir Trevor Phillips OBE for thinktank Policy Exchange yesterday, Met Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said it takes fives times more work to get cases to court than it did 20 years ago. ‘The complex legal duties of disclosure and redaction have been pushed to the front end of the system, slowing down justice and creating nugatory work for officers,’ Rowley said. ‘In other jurisdictions, prosecutors do most of this work, the work we expect police officers to do, and it’s done post-charge. It’s no surprise if you make a system more costly and bureaucratic, it will achieve less. That’s why we have fewer cases solved and successfully prosecuted than we did over past decades. Criminal justice reform is overdue and the effect of that will be to let the police police'...

Following the event, a CPS spokesperson said: 'We apply the Code for Crown Prosecutors in accordance with the law. The guidance applies to everyone and ensures that decisions are fair, transparent, and consistent. The job of our prosecutors is not to decide whether someone is guilty or innocent, but to present cases to a jury to consider whenever a case meets our legal test.'

The police watchdog has announced an investigation into Greater Manchester police’s handling of Andrew Malkinson’s case. Malkinson was exonerated in July of a rape for which he wrongly spent 17 years in prison after a DNA breakthrough. The court of appeal also ruled that disclosure failures by Greater Manchester police (GMP) rendered his conviction unsafe.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) will investigate the force’s handling of the case and whether any officers may have committed criminal offences or professional misconduct. The decision follows a local investigation by GMP’s professional standards branch, which concluded earlier this year that there was no indication that officers involved had committed professional misconduct, or given an unsatisfactory performance...

Scotland Yard has apologised and paid “substantial damages” to two women arrested during the vigil for Sarah Everard, in a major climbdown following years of legal battles over the policing of the event. In a move that the new Metropolitan police commissioner, Mark Rowley, will hope draws a line under one of the darkest periods of the Met’s recent history, the force acknowledged that it was “understandable” that Patsy Stevenson and Dania Al-Obeid had wanted to attend a candlelit vigil at Clapham Common because they felt women had been “badly let down”.

The women told the Guardian the apology had been hard-won and was welcome, but vowed to continue to “speak up about police abuse” and fight for better policing of violence against women and girls. The women both attended the vigil for Everard, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a serving Metropolitan police officer, in March 2021, when Covid restrictions on large gatherings were in place...