page_title: Death of Ian Tomlinson
section_title: Decision not to prosecute
hierarchical_section_title: Death of Ian Tomlinson / Legal aftermath / Decision not to prosecute
caption_attribution_description: English: Official portrait of Keir Starmer, taken in June 2017
context_page_description: Ian Tomlinson was a newspaper vendor who collapsed and died in the City of London after being struck by a police officer during the 2009 G-20 summit protests. After an inquest jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing, the officer, Simon Harwood, was prosecuted for manslaughter. He was found not guilty but was dismissed from the police service for gross misconduct. Following civil proceedings, the Metropolitan Police Service paid Tomlinson's family an undisclosed sum and acknowledged that Harwood's actions had caused Tomlinson's death.
  The first post-mortem concluded that Tomlinson had suffered a heart attack, but a week later The Guardian published video of Harwood, a constable with London's Metropolitan Police, striking Tomlinson on the leg with a baton, then pushing him to the ground. Tomlinson was not a protester, and at the time he was struck was trying to make his way home through the police cordons. He walked away after the incident, but collapsed and died minutes later.
context_section_description: In April 2010 The Guardian published an open letter from several public figures asking the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to proceed with a prosecution or explain its position. In July that year Keir Starmer, director of the CPS, announced that there would be no prosecution because of the medical disagreement between the three pathologists. Starmer said there was enough evidence for an assault charge, but the six-month deadline for that had expired.
  The area of conflict concerned Patel's finding during the first autopsy of "intraabdominal fluid blood about 3l with small blood clot". This was interpreted by other medical experts to mean that Patel had found three litres of blood in Tomlinson's abdomen. Starmer said this would have been around 60 percent of Tomlinson's blood volume, a "highly significant indicator of the cause of death".
  In April 2010 Patel introduced an ambiguity in a second report for the CPS, saying he had found "intraabdominal fluid with blood about 3l with small blood clot" [emphasis added]. The ambiguity had to be clarified, because the second and third pathologists had relied in part on Patel's original notes to form their views. Patel was interviewed twice by the CPS. According to Starmer, Patel "maintained that the total fluid was somewhat in excess of three litres but that it was mainly ascites (a substance which forms in a damaged liver), which had been stained with blood. He had not retained the fluid nor had he sampled it in order to ascertain the proportion of blood because, he said, he had handled blood all his professional life and he knew that this was not blood but blood-stained ascites." Patel also said he had found no internal rupture that would have led to this degree of blood loss.
  Several conclusions were drawn from discussions between Patel and the CPS, Starmer said: (a) because Patel had not retained or sampled the three litres of fluid, no firm conclusions could be drawn about the nature of it; (b) for Tomlinson's death to have resulted so quickly from blood loss, there would have to have been a significant internal rupture; (c) Patel found no such rupture; (d) the later postmortems also found no visible rupture; and (e) because Patel was the only person to have examined Tomlinson's intact body, he was in the best position to judge the nature of the fluid, and whether there was a rupture that could have caused it. This meant that Patel's evidence would significantly undermine the evidence of the second and third pathologists.
  Nathaniel Cary, the second pathologist, objected to the CPS's decision. Cary told The Guardian that the push had caused a haemorrhage to Tomlinson's abdomen, and the haemorrhage caused him to collapse. Cary said Tomlinson was vulnerable to this because he had liver disease. The CPS had erred in dismissing a charge of actual bodily harm (ABH), in his view. In a letter to Tomlinson's family, the CPS described Tomlinson's injuries as "relatively minor" and therefore insufficient to support such a charge. But Cary told The Guardian: "The injuries were not relatively minor. He sustained quite a large area of bruising. Such injuries are consistent with a baton strike, which could amount to ABH. It's extraordinary. If that's not ABH I would like to know what is."
caption: Keir Starmer, director of the CPS,[7]
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "MP Portraits Project in The Reasons Room.", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "GIMP 2.10.20", "Image DateTime": "2020:12:27 18:06:03", "Image ExifOffset": "192", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "192", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "256", "Thumbnail BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail PhotometricInterpretation": "6", "Thumbnail SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "380", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6353", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB"}