Following a series of stories about the number of people killed by mental health patients (1,200 in Britain in a decade, said The Sun), we decided to look at a single year in depth to illustrate the situation in London. In 2011 there were a total of 119 homicides. Twelve out of those 119 (just …
Category archives: The Justice System
Fitness to Plead: The Pritchard Criteria
What happens when the suspect in a murder trial is unable to understand the trial process? And what has that got to do with a man accused of having sex with an animal in 1836? In October 2012, 65 year-old Colin Hammond was stabbed to death in a street in Fulham, southwest London, by Frederic …
Sanction Detection Rates
The ‘murder rate’ is one way of measuring the effectiveness of the justice system. Another is the percentage of homicides that are ‘cleared up’ – otherwise known as the Sanction Detection Rate. This means cases where a suspect has been identified but not necessarily convicted of the crime, perhaps because they have been acquitted on …
Suspicious and Unexplained Deaths
The case of MI6 spy Gareth Williams is one of those rare mysteries that seems to defy all logic. It begins with a body, but it is a body within a locked bag within a locked room. Detectives and scientists have marshaled all their resources in an attempt to work out how it happened yet …
The London Homicide Manual
How do detectives investigate a murder? Books, TV programmes and documentaries give us some idea – even if their focus is on a single grizzled cop who solves a homicide single-handed. But what exactly is the ‘procedure’ when that call first comes in about a dead body? As it happens the Metropolitan Police have what …