Director of Public Prosecutions resigns

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Ms Alison Saunders (the Lawyer who leads and is ultimately responsible for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)) has announced that she will not be extending her five-year term and will be resigning.

This move seems to be a result of budget cuts to the CPS and failed convictions. For example, staff costs in 2010 were £738 million and by 2016 they had fallen to £291 million. Staff numbers have also fallen from 7,745 in 2010 to about 6,000.

It is also thought that the CPS as an organisation has failed to move with the times and has been struggling to cope with the volume of evidence in cases generated by digital equipment that needs to be disclosed to the defence.

More recently, the CPS has been criticised after police and CPS staff failed to disclose important information from mobile phones to the Defence in a series of rape prosecutions causing them to collapse.

The duty of disclose is an important one and the consequences of failing to disclose are clear. The CPS (and to a certain extent the Defence) have a duty to disclose all relevant information that they are relying on as well as information they are not relying on. These duties are outlined in the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 and the Criminal Procedure Rules.

Despite this, Ms Saunders final comments about our justice system were:

“The criminal justice landscape is changing rapidly, as crime trends shift and courts become increasingly digital. Our work is now more complex, with the evolving nature of economic crime, the on-going terrorism threat and a huge increase in reports of historic sexual abuse.”

(Did you know: Ms Saunders started her position in November 2013 and has previously been a Chief Crown Prosecutor for London and has overseen the convictions of the killers of Stephen Lawrence).

If you would like to discuss the contents of this article and/or require legal representation at the police station and/or at Court please do not hesitate to contact our Criminal Law Team at Johnson Astills on 0116 255 4855 or email us at crimeteam@johnsonastills.com.