PRESS RELEASE- 27th OCTOBER 2022 – 4 YEARS SINCE THE SUICIDES OF WILLIAM LINDSAY & KATIE ALLAN
4 YEARS SINCE THE SUICIDES OF WILLIAM LINDSAY & KATIE ALLAN
THEIR FAMILIES MET WITH PRINCIPAL CROWN COUNSEL AT CROWN OFFICE ON THURSDAY 27TH OCTOBER IN EDINBURGH
Statement on behalf of the families by their solicitor Aamer Anwar: –
“The families of both William and Katie met with Principal Crown Counsel Ashley Edwards KC this morning. Linda, Stuart and Scott Allan are the mother, father and younger brother of Katie; John Reilly is the older brother of William- both families attended the meeting along with their lawyers Aamer Anwar & April Meechan. The meeting lasted some two hours, following which the families issued statement outside Crown Office.
Crown Office believes that there was credible and reliable evidence of a breach of the Health and Safety Act by the Scottish Prison Service that materially contributed to the deaths of Katie Allan and William Lindsay, yet Crown Immunity means there can be no prosecution of the Scottish Ministers and therefore no justice for their families.
4 years ago, on the 7th October, the body of a 16-year-old child was found dead in his cell at Polmont, some 72 hours after he arrived there on remand. His name was William Lindsay. William was sent there by our courts because our criminal justice system could not find a children’s secure unit place and the desperate concerns of his social workers went ignored.
William was in and out of care since the age of three, self-harming since the age of 8, considered a high risk of suicide from the age of 13 and had on several occasions attempted to take his own life.
In 2018 everyone from the First Minister to politicians offered ‘sincere condolences’ and promised ‘lessons would be learned’, yet on the 4th anniversary of a terrified child taking his own life, he is forgotten by all those who promised to never forget William.
Katie Allan was 21 when she took her own life at HMYOI Polmont. 21, was the number of days that she had left to serve before being eligible for home detention curfew. As Katie’s mother Linda said her daughter “didn’t get HDC either, she couldn’t face 21 seconds more, let alone days in the care of the Scottish Prison Service. Bullied, violated, crushed…she could take no more.”
As a nation we also have one of the highest imprisonment rates, rates of remand prisoners and the highest number of suicides in custody in Western Europe. A democracy is judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens, that usually includes children and prisoners, but William and Katie along with so many others were failed miserably by Scotland.
Both families are tired of the Crown Office mantra “There will be a mandatory fatal accident inquiry, but whilst the process is on-going, it is not appropriate to comment.”
Sadly, we see little honesty from the SPS, death, self-harm, abuse of power is the daily reality of many prisons. The suicide rate has reached a peak in the last decade but the SPS remains in a state of denial, incapable of reforming itself.
In October 2020 we submitted a victim’s right to review the decision to prosecute in the case of Katie and William- that VRR was prepared by our Senior Counsel Dorothy Bain KC, now the Lord Advocate. There were two main potential criminal offences – Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 & Section 1 of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007.
It is shocking for the families in both cases to learn that the Crown Office believes that there was ‘sufficient credible and reliable evidence to establish a breach of Section 3’. In both the cases of William and Katie, the Crown concluded that the breach of the Health and Safety Act by the Scottish Prison Service materially contributed to their deaths. The Crown Office agrees that the Scottish Ministers owed a duty under Section 3 to prisoners such as William and Katie, however the Section 48 under the 1974 Act gives Scottish Ministers, (i.e. the Crown) immunity from prosecution.
Principal Crown Counsel concluded that the only option available to the Crown is to request that the Health and Safety Executive carry out a process known as Crown censure of the Scottish Ministers for a breach of Section 3 of the 1974 Act.
Although this would be unprecedented, it is not guaranteed it would happen, both families demand the lifting of crown immunity which effectively gives the prison service a ‘license to kill’, with no effective remedy from Scottish Ministers to seek justice.
The irony is that had Katie or William died in a private prison, a police cell or mental health hospital, those institutions would have been prosecuted, yet the Scottish Prison Service has immunity and cannot be prosecuted that is shameful and an abuse of power.
John Reilly- Brother of William Lindsay
My family no longer have any trust in the Crown Office, Scottish Government, the Scottish Prison Service or an FAI to deliver justice or the truth. My mother Christine Lindsay died with her heart being broken that she was unable to fulfil her duty to her child William and give him justice.
Today the Crown Office should hang its head in shame, because they tell us that there is absolutely nothing they can do other than offer my family a ‘censure’ of the Scottish Prison Service and even that is not guaranteed, do they really think my brother’s life is so cheap?
Scott Allan
For those who do not know me, I am Scott. My appearance in this campaign has been scarce. My reasons for this are numerous, namely in dealing with the grief left by my sister’s passing, and the trauma inflicted at the hands of the system that killed her. What the Scottish criminal justice system has taken from my family is beyond words. but is in the truest sense, immoral.
Since Katie’s death, I have lost more than a sister, I have lost my dearest friend, I have lost hope in the ‘state’ and I have lost what remained of my childhood. The hatred I feel towards those responsible for Katie’s death is one that lingers even now, but it is not what I feel towards the institution in which she was incarcerated, as I do not believe they deserve such devotion of thought.
Katie was not just the victim of humiliation and degradation but was one amongst the many that have been punished for their humanity. This punishment is but one example of Scotland’s unjust treatment of those labelled criminals and incarcerated. Katie, like many others didn’t need to suffer, Katie, like many others, didn’t need to die.
The state killed Katie. The state tortured her, broke her, stripped her of hope. The state bound her like it binds us all, with hate and with fear. The state took from her what it has taken from us all, the right to be human. The state has taken from me my sister, but once again today it continues to fail Katie by failing to hold to account the Scottish Prison Service.
Linda & Stuart Allan
The death of a child is arguably the worst thing that can happen to a parent. In 2018, when Katie died we naively thought the worst had happened – we were wrong. Over the past four and a half years, whilst learning to live without our daughter and dealing with our personal grief, we have had to dig deep to survive all that the Scottish criminal justice system has thrown at us. From the day we viewed our daughter’s body at the morgue to celebrating her 25th birthday without her, the trauma has continued.
Days after Katie’s death, we spoke to a Procurator Fiscal Depute, explaining that Katie’s death had been entirely preventable – we were ignored. A year later, in a meeting with senior crown officials, once again we were told that there was insufficient evidence for criminal proceedings. We questioned this, sharing our own personal research – we were ignored.
Following a request for a review of the Crown’s decision not to prosecute in 2020 we received a letter in July of this year, it stated
“Principal Crown Counsel considered that there is sufficient credible and reliable evidence to establish a breach of Section 3. Katie’s decision to take her own life ‘did not exonerate and could not exonerate’ those who had a duty to keep her safe…There was sufficient credible and reliable evidence available to support that there had been a breach of Section 3 of the 1974 (Health & Safety) Act, that there were reasonable prospects of a conviction and that this breach materially contributed to Katie’s death”
However, the letter went on to state “That due to the operation of Crown immunity no criminal proceedings can be raised…(the) COPFS is therefore unable, as a matter of law, to prosecute the Scottish Ministers for breaching Section 3 and materially contributing to Katie’s death despite the fact that it is considered that a sufficiency of credible and reliable evidence exists and there are reasonable prospects of a conviction.”
Simply put, the Scottish prison service has a license to kill.
Since Katie and William’s death in 2018, 50 people have died by suicide within Scottish prisons. The youngest was a 20year old young man, who also died in Polmont. A third of these deaths were individuals on remand. Put another way, 50 people have died whilst the Crown Office have been reaching a decision on whether to prosecute.
The crown office is uniquely placed to gather information on these deaths, to analyse and investigate trends and possible systemic failures and they claim to do so.
Yet reading all available fatal accident inquiries (and we have read over 200 of them), not one crown agent presents evidence on such failures. Not one focusses on anything but the circumstances of the individual death, presenting assumption after assumption on the effectiveness of the Scottish prison services suicide prevention strategy (calling on the SPS time and time again to defend its own strategy). No evidence is presented on the common themes emerging from self-inflicted deaths – the ineffectiveness of the strategy; the problems with communication; the lack of evidence based assessments; bullying; strip searching, the use of barbaric ‘safer cells’….and many more.
For four and a half years we have researched, questioned and highlighted the gross negligence of a system that is legally allowed to kill individuals, in the name of the state. Four and a half years later whilst grieving for the loss of our daughter and countless other young people, we are forced to campaign. How much longer will we have to?
