The Deadly Table-Leg

The Vicar of Downing Street's old school chum Peter Goldsmith, whose position on the legality of the Iraq assault was such a model of consistency, independence and integrity, has denied any political interference in the Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute the killers of Harry Stanley. This is certainly reassuring.

The Independent newspaper notes that there have been thirty fatal shootings by police in the past twelve years. Many of them were undoubtedly justified in the circumstances; those who fire at policemen, wave guns in the air or take other people hostage can hardly expect the police to give them a chance to do worse. Others are a little more doubtful.

Before open season was declared on darkies with rucksacks, British police officers were allowed to discharge their weapons to defend themselves or to protect members of the public whose lives were in danger. The guidelines recommended that they "shoot to incapacitate".

Harry Stanley was incapacitated with extreme prejudice in 1999 after a telephone caller told police they had seen an Irishman with a sawn-off shotgun in a bag. The killers told an inquest last year that Stanley, a Scotsman, had turned "in a slow, deliberate, fluid motion" and pointed the plastic bag he was carrying in "a classic firing posture". Like the string of falsehoods more recently told by the police in connection with the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, this story did not stand up to scrutiny. Like de Menezes, though with a little less enthusiasm, Stanley was shot in the back of the head.

The Crown Prosecution Service said it was "arguable that the officers' haste and lack of planning led them to breach their duty of care to Mr Stanley and cause his death", which sounds very much like criminal negligence; but nobody is going to be prosecuted - not for murder, not for manslaughter, not for conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice.

Although the officers were present at Stanley's death and presumably were not suffering schizoid hallucinations or the effects of mind-altering drugs, and although the forensic evidence contradicted their version of events, two specialists have concluded that the evidence did not prove the officers were lying. The specialists were in the pay of the Police Federation and Surrey Police, respectively, so their conclusions are unimpeachable. Perhaps the officers' firearms training had neglected to stress the distinction between the part of a target's head that can aim a table-leg and the part that can't.