No charges on 'cash-for-honours'

[Filuwaúrdjan]

No-one is to face charges after the 16-month cash-for-honours police inquiry

[Democratic Hawk]

Time to draw a line under this now and for the political parties to seek consensus on state funding

Dave

[afleitch]

Not enough evidence to prosecute I see.

Maybe the police should hold the suspects without charge indefinitely until such evidence is found (or should 90 days about do it Gordon?)

[Јas]

Not enough evidence to prosecute I see.

Presumably the police did feel that there was enough evidence though if the Crown Prosecution Service were considering the matter. 

Maybe the police should hold the suspects without charge indefinitely until such evidence is found (or should 90 days about do it Gordon?)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Presumably the police did feel that there was enough evidence though if the Crown Prosecution Service were considering the matter.

No, it just means that they (the police) wanted certain people convicted. Happily, an independent prosecuting authority means that miscarriages of justice and cases collapsing due to lack of credible evidence (and this one would certainly have been the latter) are rarer than used to be the case.

Saying that, some elements of the way the investigation was handled were (to me at least) pretty disturbing; made worse by the claims that the police "usually" do things that way.

[Јas]

Presumably the police did feel that there was enough evidence though if the Crown Prosecution Service were considering the matter.

No, it just means that they (the police) wanted certain people convicted. Happily, an independent prosecuting authority means that miscarriages of justice and cases collapsing due to lack of credible evidence (and this one would certainly have been the latter) are rarer than used to be the case.

Of course (and recalling certain Irishmen's history with British justice in times past) an independent authority is certainly very important. The lawyers I'm sure would want a higher standard of evidence than the police, but that doesn't mean that the police (or certain persons therein) didn't feel there was enough to run a case on. (I suspect, it can't be that easy to keep a high-level investigation like this running for 16 months without the accumulation of some significant evidence.)

This is not to say that I think a criminal investigation necessarily should have been had into this matter at all.