Schoolgirl Accused of Assault – No Further Action

Case study summary

Our client was a 15-year-old student who had been accused of assault. The police’s evidence was contradictory and it was clear our client was not at fault. Our specialist criminal lawyers took the right tactics to ensure the case was dropped.

Case study

We were approached by a 15-year-old school student and her family. The police contacted her and told her that she had been accused of assaulting another teenager.

Our client was concerned that a conviction for this offence could affect her education and early career prospects. Therefore, she instructed our specialist criminal defence lawyers to represent her.

We were advised by the police that they had a statement from another teenager alleging that our client had run up to her and assaulted her in the park and that this girl had no choice but to defend herself against our client’s attacks.

The police explained that this had been caught on video by one of the other teenager’s present. The police were reluctant to show us the video before the interview but we persuaded them to. After viewing this, it was clear that this video contradicted the complainant’s statement. The video starts after the fight between the two girls had already begun and showed our client on the floor and the other girl as the aggressor.

This was a case where the police’s two pieces of evidence, the statement and the video, told very different stories. The video called into question the credibility of the complainant’s whole account. Overall, this left the police with a very weak case and one that was almost certainly never going to end in our client being charged. When evidence is weak, the correct tactical decision is often to put forward no comment as we did not want to give the police any information which may have added to their case. This left the police with no choice but to drop the case without even reffering it to the Crown Prosecution Service for a charging decision.

The client was relieved the case had ended so quickly and her family were glad that her education and employment opportunities would not be limited by a criminal record.