Overview

• Linda Westcarr wrote to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer describing a “systemic collapse” in justice and requesting an urgent meeting.
• She asked that the Lord Chancellor, the Home Secretary and the Victims’ Commissioner attend to discuss reforms to psychiatric evidence and sentencing in diminished responsibility cases.
• Prosecutors accepted Gogoa Lois Tape’s guilty plea to manslaughter by diminished responsibility after psychiatric assessments, and the judge said he held paranoid and persecutory delusions consistent with undiagnosed schizophrenia.
• Judge Freya Newbery imposed a hospital order detaining Tape indefinitely under the Mental Health Act rather than a prison sentence.
• A court heard that after the killing in April last year, Tape drove Kennedi Westcarr-Sabaroche’s body around for hours before confessing to his brother.