UNITED KINGDOM
Mail on Sunday
By Martin Beckford and Paul Cahalan for The Mail on Sunday
The Director of Public Prosecutions was under growing pressure to stand down last night over her failure to put Lord Janner on trial for serious child abuse offences.
Alison Saunders’s position as the country’s top prosecutor looked bleak as she faced unprecedented criticism from the Home Secretary, police chiefs, crime tsars, prominent MPs – and even one of her predecessors.
Mrs Saunders said her job as head of the Crown Prosecution Service was to make the correct legal decisions in difficult cases, not the most popular ones. But she was accused of ignoring the rights of victims and of perpetrating Establishment cover-ups by deciding that Labour peer Lord Janner should not be charged – despite evidence of 22 offences against nine victims dating back to the 1960s.
Theresa May became the first Cabinet Minister to question the DPP’s judgment in ruling that the 86-year-old should not be prosecuted on the grounds that his dementia is now too advanced for him to have a fair trial.
The Home Secretary told the BBC: ‘I was very concerned when I heard about this decision. I have been very clear in everything I have said so far about the child sexual abuse issue… I expect to see justice done.’
Former DPP Lord Macdonald of River Glaven said it would have been better if Lord Janner had undergone a procedure whereby a jury can decide on the facts of a case without apportioning guilt and without a sentence being passed, if a suspect is unfit to plead.
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