Rustem Guardian secures dismissal of all charges

Rustem Guardian secures dismissal of all charges

 

 Rustem Guardian secured dismissal of Causing Grievous Bodily Harm (GBH), Assault Occasioning Actual Bodily Harm and Criminal Damage charges through legal argument, challenging the legality of resurrecting a case after community resolution as an abuse of process as well as a successful application to dismiss.

 Geo Song’s client, K, a taxi driver with limited English was charged with GBH s.20 and criminal damage following an altercation.

 K had reluctantly accepted a community resolution following an incident where he contested liability. However, in order to resolve matters, K had accepted the police suggestion. This pre-dated the firm’s involvement in his case.

 The complainant decided to push for more serious charges and the case was re-opened.

 Geo Song and Rhys Rosser of 2BR Chambers were successful in submitting applications to dismiss the charges against K on the basis of insufficient evidence and abuse of process.

 The prosecution, following the service of legal argument from the defence, accepted that they had insufficient evidence to prove that really serious harm had been caused and so the indictment was amended to allege an offence of ABH. Geo and Rhys were able to then successfully argue that there was insufficient evidence to show that the harm caused amounted to ABH, the Judge dismissed that charge.

 It was the prosecution’s case that, despite K’s matter having been initially dealt with by way of community resolution, there were still grounds to go to trial as it was argued that the prosecution had not provided an unequivocal representation that K was not to be prosecuted.

 However, further submissions were made against the prosecution to drop all charges against K.

 The prosecution then offered no evidence against the criminal damage charge.

 The submissions were centred around the law on causation and the facts of the injury actually caused.

 The prosecution confirmed that, upon review, it would not be in the public interest to take the matter any further and all charges against K were ultimately dropped.