England: DPP suggests checking photos not ‘obvious line of enquiry’ in rape cases

The head of the Crown Prosecution Service has suggested photographs and social media accounts do not need to be fully checked in rape cases.

Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, said no one has been jailed after being wrongly convicted because of failures to disclose key pieces of evidence.

Her comments come after Scotland Yard launched a review of 30 sex cases awaiting trial after two rape prosecutions collapsed in one week last month.

The prosecution of Samson Makele, 28, collapsed after evidence emerged showing him and his accuser cuddling in bed.

Detectives had failed to disclose these photos.

Ms Saunders, however, said checking for photos is not an obvious line of enquiry.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Well it is not because if you have a case where people have briefly known each other there is nothing that says there will be photographs. What the police obligation is is to pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry.

“That doesn’t mean going into every single avenue of your life. They would look to see if there was contact as in text messages which they did and which we looked at and we served.

“But they did not know what else was on the phone.”

She also rejected criticism that this was failure on the part of the police.

She said: “We don’t look into every single aspect of everybody’s life. There has got to be a proportionate response.

“This is where there is a complete systemic issue because it is about everybody doing their job so everybody looking, so the police doing all reasonable lines of enquiry, making sure that they are looking because their obligation is to look at things that both exonerate and also that provide us with evidence that is going to convict somebody.

“We are there to look and see whether it should be disclosed, whether it undermines our case or assists which means we have got to have it from the police in the first place and then it is for the defence, and this is part of our system, to raise issues which are their defence which say, for example in that case the suspect must have known he had taken photographs.

“That could have been raised very early. When it was raised, which was properly raised at the time and we looked at it, we discontinued the case straight away.”