Committal proceedings
Sir: May I correct an obviously unintentional error that appeared in your editorial of 2 December. In my letter to The Times, it was pointed out that the prosecuting solicitor in England and Wales had the police as his client — not as you had it that the prosecuting solicitor is a client of the police. The prosecuting solicitor /police client relationship is complex in that not only has the prosecuting solicitor the police informant as client but the Chief Constable as well — and indeed the individual officer in a given case where that person is not the informant. While in practice this diversity of client rarely causes difficulty, it is clearly unsatisfactory.
As you point out, the time is ripe for change but we would enter a caveat against the importing of practices from other jurisdictions that both historically and constitutionally have developed along diverse lines. The three aspects of investigation of crime, the decision to institute proceedings and the right to present the prosecution in court are, in England and Wales, all in the hands of the police save in those numerically few cases that are handled by the Director of Public Prosecutions. In Scotland these three functions are in effect under the control of Procurators Fiscal. We in this society would argue strongly that these three functions should not be in the same set of hands.
Changes are needed but at the same time questions of cost, manpower and other mat ters have to be considered. Compromise, while not necessarily a desirable aim, is a tradition of some excellence in this country and we believe that an entirely workable, economic and satisfactory approach to the problem of the institution and continuance of prosecutions is contained in our written evidence to the Royal Conimission on Criminal Procedure. The revision of forms of committal proceedings is one of a number of matters that must in our view be dependent on the acceptance of a need for there to be an independent legal assessment of the results of a pOlice or other law enforcement agency investigation, with power for those making the assessment ultimately to decide in a particular case whether a prosecution should commence or having commenced be continued.
I. S. Manson President, The Prosecuting Solicitors' Society of England and Wales, County Hall, Queensway, Birmingham
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