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 …

The Terry Gregory Murder Case

The list of Freedom of Information requests dealt with by the Metropolitan Police can make fascinating reading. The most recent from the beginning of March concern questions about ‘road spike apparatus accidents’, statistics on pickpocketing and the number of victims of knife crime in 2010 and 2011. We have previously featured the Met’s five year …