Police Drop False Sexual Assault and ABH Allegation

Case study summary

After a drunken night out our client was wrongly accused of sexual assault and ABH in Oxford city centre. Our specialist criminal defence lawyers applied significant pressure on the police to obtain key CCTV evidence. They then dropped the case and took no further action.

Case study

Our client was falsely accused of Actual Bodily Harm, s.47 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (ABH) and Sexual Assault under s.3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. He was a successful businessman and director of two companies who stood to lose everything if he was charged with the offences.

He was arrested following a night out with a friend. It was late in the evening in a busy nightspot when our client and his friend had a heated exchange with a noisy group of drinkers. The words unfortunately escalated into a scuffle, which ended with both our client and his friend being arrested for physical and sexual assault. Bizarrely, one of the females in the group accused both men of putting their hands up her skirt during the scuffle.

It was our client's very first involvement with the police. As a result, he took up the offer of representation from the duty solicitor. Sadly, he received bad advice and his lawyer told him to answer all the questions asked of him. This was all despite the fact he was extremely anxious and had at best a hazy memory of the incident.

Once he had been released from the station he quickly realised that he needed the help of specialist sexual offences solicitors. He found us online and called us straight away. Following an initial consultation, we immediately knew something didn’t add up with the allegation.

We quickly got on the phone and spoke to the officer on his behalf. We established that the police, to our surprise, hadn’t viewed any CCTV of what happened. We realised then that the case could turn on this, and we made it very clear to him that in our professional view it was very important for him to obtain it without delay. By now we were becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of our client losing everything over what looked to us to be a false allegation.

We pressed hard every week until we finally got the officer on our side. He eventually did review the footage as we asked and realised that he had been sold a tissue of lies by the complainant. The officer actually thanked us for our perseverance and decided that the police would take No Further Action.

Our client told us that he was elated that the truth had been uncovered and that he could continue working on the life he had worked so hard to build.