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Why on earth would the Metropolitan Police ask Sue Gray to write up key parts of her independent report? This question has been buzzing on Twitter all day. It's the first question I asked myself when I saw the story, and it was a question that popped up several hundred times in my mentions of people understandably confused by the curious Met statement, released this morning:
“For the events that the Met is investigating, we requested that a minimum reference be made in the Cabinet Office report.
“The Met did not request any limitations on other events in the report, or for the report to be delayed, but we have had ongoing contact with the Cabinet Office, including on the content of the report, to avoid any prejudice to our investigation. .”
I was confused too. It seemed to me no good reason why the police should worry about an internal civil service report that, by its own terms, does not offer criminal convictions, but merely a distillation of facts.
And I said so much. If the investigation focuses solely on breaches of covid-19 regulations, these cannot lead to a trial in Crown Court; in fact, they likely won't result in any action or a modest fixed-penalty notice, so there's no chance of doing any harm to a potential juror. a consideration It is possible, from what we know, that the investigation extends to much more serious crimes, such as misconduct in public office or the performance of acts tending and intended to pervert the course of justice, which could result in a jury trial many moons from now (most cases being investigated now can expect a Crown Court trial in 2024 or 2025).
Even so, however, contempt of court laws, designed to protect jurors from damaging material, do not apply at this stage of a police investigation, so there is no legal bar. At this point to the publication of what might otherwise be damaging information.
So what is the problem?
The answer – and I appreciate the wisdom of, among others, criminal legal leader Andrew Keogh – may not be immediately obvious to many (although it should have been to me). But it is important.
In my lawyer's wig, I was concentrating on future court proceedings. But the real potential bias relates to the police investigation. Which, in fairness to the Met, is what his statement said.
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— @nettux | José Ferreira Neto Fri Apr 27 02:12:07 +0000 2012
If you have not been involved in or the subject of a police investigation, these types of things are probably not obvious. But once you pause to think it through, it makes sense. A key part of an investigation, especially when police are investigating events that included multiple potential witnesses and potential suspects, includes obtaining accounts from those individuals. In the case of witnesses, the police would normally take a statement, signed and dated by the witness to confirm its truth and accuracy. Suspects, on the other hand, will be interviewed under caution, with the right to legal representation.
There are similarities in the processes. On the one hand, the police want to obtain a version of the person that is, as far as possible, free from the influence of what other people have told him. If you saw a group of people having a drink in a garden, your recollection of who was there and what was said, especially when asked a year or two after the event, may be influenced, even without realizing it, by what they told them. For other people. Memory is easily corruptible. The police want to guard against this.
But with a suspect, there's even more reason to control the flow of information. When police interview a suspect, they provide a "pre-interview disclosure," a summary of what the police want to ask. Writing this disclosure is something of an art. You want to give the interviewee fair notice so you can give her the best honest answers, but you also don't want to give guilty people the opportunity to build an edifice of lies around your entire case. Therefore, it will withhold certain information to see if the interviewee is caught in a provable lie or says something that contradicts what another witness or suspect is saying. Because if the case is later processed, what a suspect says in the interview is admissible evidence against him. And if they have lied in the interview, it can potentially influence their credibility.
In other words, the last thing you would want, as an investigator, is for a group of powerful and organized suspects to be presented with a summary of everything the police know, and given the opportunity, before being interviewed, to invent a false exculpatory account, or to destroy evidence they knew had not yet come to light, or to have a kind word with witnesses who had not yet spoken to investigators.
Sue Gray's report, if it offers summaries of what witnesses or suspects have said about the events currently being investigated by the Met, could be just that document. It would offer a cheat sheet for any guilty party (no pun intended) who wanted to gain an advantage in the police investigation.
This may be why the Met is so anxious that the report omit details related to the parties currently under investigation.
Now none of that explains or justifies the conduct of the Metropolitan Police in recent months. The leadership has been headless. Mixed messages – from the absurd “we don't investigate retrospective crimes”, to “wait for Sue Gray”, to 'stop Sue Gray posting juicy stuff' – have undermined public trust, perhaps beyond repair. This entire fiasco might have been avoided if the Met, when first presented with evidence of continuing breaches of the law at the heart of government, had promptly announced an investigation, rather than being dragged into that position by a combination of pressure and an apparent fear of leaders. being further undermined by critical findings once Sue Gray's report was imminent.
The Met's record in this investigation does not inspire faith. His all-time record has earned him little credit. And there is no doubt that the times of his repeated dithering have provided political cover for a Prime Minister who, whatever the outcome of the criminal investigation, has evidently violated his own guidance.
But a political 'sewn'? It is too early for such accusations to be leveled sensibly. As things stand, there are potentially valid reasons for the Met's stance. The provable charge against the Met is unforgivable incompetence at the highest level. We'll have to wait for the outcome of their investigation, the precise details of what Met officials knew at the time about the alleged crime, and the transparency of the Met's final decision-making, before deciding if Hanlon's Razor needs to be snapped in half. .
The Secret Barrister is a practicing criminal attorney, blogger, and author. This article originally appeared on the Secret Barrister blog.