Prosecution Offer No Evidence Against Defendant Without a Viable Defence

This defendant, represented in the Crown Court by barrister Harry Bowyer, was charged with assaulting an emergency worker. He had been charged with a motoring offence (hence SBC involvement) and was being booked in at the Police Station. The defendant had told the arresting officers and the custody sergeant that he was autistic. The police at this stage should have treated him as a vulnerable prisoner and acquired an appropriate adult for him. He had in fact been arrested for an offence of which he was not guilty (another person admitted being the driver at the relevant time). One of the features of autism is that when the world does not stack up as it should then the autistic person finds this more frustrating than others might. In an extreme case this can lead to a “meltdown” where the autistic person effectively has no control over their actions. The defendant at this stage struggled with the police at the custody desk which led to the assault charge.

Whilst the defendant was acting in a state of automatism the automatism came from his condition rather than external factors which could have amounted to a defence but owing to an archaic corner of the law that defence would have been one of insanity.

The defendant did not fancy a verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

In this case the decision was made to put the prosecution to strict proof as to whether the officers were acting in their function as emergency workers(a matter of fact for the jury) and to prepare an abuse of process argument/S78 argument to exclude the evidence of the assault owing to the breaches of Code C of PACE 1984.

The prosecution was asked to review the case in the light of all of the circumstances and very correctly decided that it was not in the public interest to continue with the prosecution and offered no evidence against the defendant.