It's a negligible freedom. The CPS can always choose to seize control of any prosecution and, if it sees fit, discontinue the prosecution. So at most they can choose to ignore a prosecution unless either the prosecutor or accused bring it to their attention specifically, and if that happens they're obliged to actually do something (though that might be explicitly taking no action, it's distinct from ignorance because there's a process they have to follow by law to decide what to do).

This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †

There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.

† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.

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masfuerte 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I know that the CPS could seize and shutdown a politically sensitive case but as far as I know that has never happened. And I hope that if it did people would make a fuss.

Relatedly, after Peter Tatchell failed to arrest Robert Mugabe the government changed the law so that prosecutions for breaches of international law could only be brought by the government.

Anyway, I agree that I'd rather face a criminal charge here than in America.

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tialaramex 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know what you mean by "politically sensitive"

The CPS does not track what happens to prosecutions it has taken control of. Conveniently they're just CPS cases once that happens, and so the question "What happened to them?" is magically a manual discernment and not amenable to FOIA.

We can ask, and so we have, how many they took control of. The answer is typically in the range of few dozen but not a hundred per year. Since these then disappear into their normal case system they could be prosecuted exactly like any other CPS case, they could be dismissed immediately as erroneous, or any of the usual dispositions for a criminal case, and the CPS won't tell us (if we're to believe them, it doesn't know)

We know a lot of private prosecutions are by the RSPCA, since they have funding to prosecute animal abuse and money is always tight. But presumably in the typical case the CPS is either never told or if it is explicitly told by either party it chooses to do nothing and allow the prosecution to happen. So those cases would not be on the list where the CPS took control.

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masfuerte 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean cases where the state might decline to prosecute the politically powerful.

You may not be able to find out what happens to taken-over cases in general, but are you aware of any case where the CPS took over a prosecution and the original prosecutor simply doesn't know what happened in the end?

	▲	tialaramex 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you have a specific case you can just (well, I can't easily but a lawyer will know how without having to go re-read documentation they didn't look at for years) get the court records for that case and see what happened to it. The CPS claims they can't answer a FOIA "what happened to these cases?" type query because once the CPS owns the case it's just another case, but if you had a particular case in mind that's not a FOIA situation you just look at the court records. From the sound of the things you're thinking about what I'd expect is that the defendant tells the CPS, the CPS seize this case and then they have it dismissed. If you weren't looking for evidence it will be pretty easy in almost any case to decide you do not have sufficient evidence for reasonable prospect of conviction, but in such cases you can probably also make out a position that there is no public interest in such a prosecution - for example because it would be embarrassing.