LONDON (AP) — British prosecutors say they won’t charge a former lawmaker with alleged sex crimes against children because the 86-year-old politician has severe dementia.
Police and victims of child abuse expressed anger at Thursday’s decision not to charge Greville Janner.
The Crown Prosecution Service said more than a dozen people had accused Janner of abusing them during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Prosecutors said there was enough evidence to prosecute Janner, but the severity of his dementia meant “he is not fit to take part in any proceedings.”
Peter Saunders, founder of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, called the decision “bizarre and worrying.”
Assistant Chief Constable Roger Bannister of Leicestershire Police said the force was considering a legal challenge.
Janner’s family said he was “entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
If he has severe dementia and this can be definitively demonstrated, which I’m sure is the case, then he should not be tried on this.He’s not competent to defend himself and punishing him would be meaningless if he’s not competent to understand why.
His age shouldn’t be a bar on this and I was, for example, very pleased to see them go after Byron De La Beckwith for the Birmingham church bombings, even though he was quite elderly. He was competent to stand trial and competent to understand the punishement.
But typically dementia is an issue that’s raised by the defense, not the prosecution. Does he still go out in public? Is his property under conservatorship? We need more than mere assertion. (See, for example, Vincent Gigante.)
Well, they describe it as severe, so I’m guessing it’s probably a bit more than excentric. Gigante is an interesting idea. He really committed to the idea of faking senility and did it for decades and ultimately wasn’t. While one may sometimes suggest that MP are demented, they probably don’t fit the strictest legal definition.
Looking a little more closely, he received a diagnosis of Alzheimers in 2009, but on the other hand didn’t actually give up his seat in the house of lords until late 2014 when the molestation charges became big. And his family makes claims of complete innocence.
If he were a poor black man with similar mental capacity in the US, I doubt he would stand a chance.