A pedestrian who caused an elderly cyclist to fall into the path of a car when she shouted and gesticulated angrily at her was convicted of manslaughter on a ‘false legal footing’, the Court of Appeal was told this morning(WED).
CCTV footage caught Auriol Grey shouting at retired midwife Celia Ward, 77, to ‘Get off the f****** pavement’, causing her to veer into the road where she died when she was hit by a VW Passat.
Grey, 50, who has cerebral palsy and is partially blind, denied manslaughter but was found guilty following a retrial and jailed for three years in March last year.
The case was brought by her legal team to the Court of Appeal in London today where they argued she had been charged with unlawful act manslaughter, which requires an illegal action to take place that caused death.
Grey’s lawyers told judges that no such ‘base offence’ was identified at the trial.
Auriol Grey, the disabled pensioner who was jailed for causing the death of a cyclist in a pavement row, has had her manslaughter conviction overturned.
Grey shouted ‘Get off the f****** pavement’ as a retired midwife approached her on the pavement
CCTV footage showed Ms Ward falling into the road moments before she was struck by a car
Adrian Darbishire KC said: ‘The trial seems to have proceeded on the basis that some kind of unlawfulness, undefined and unspecified, was sufficient to find this offence of homicide.’
There was ‘entirely no base offence identified in this process’, he added, saying aspects of common law were ‘wholly absent’ from the advice given to the jury to help them decide whether or not the defendant was guilty.
Mr Darbishire told the court: ‘The entire legal process, and the preparation of such, proceeded on a false legal footing.’
Grey’s actions during the incident in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, in October 2020 were described in the court as a ‘hostile gesticulation’ towards grandmother Mrs Ward.
Mr Darbishire said: ‘Hostile gesticulation is not a crime, otherwise we would have 50,000 football fans each weekend being apprehended.’
His client has has reduced vision and ‘significant physical impairment’ on her right-hand side, he added.
This meant the trial jury at Peterborough Crown Court ‘needed less focus on hostility on her part’ and more attention to ‘the reasonableness of not standing aside where [it] would involve moving to her right-hand side, her unfavoured side, to let the cyclist past’.
The barrister added the jury could have concluded her actions were unnecessary but said: ‘That certainly does not make her guilty of the offence of manslaughter.
‘The evidence was clearly insufficient for the charge alleged.’
Simon Spence KC, for the Crown Prosecution Service, who are opposing the appeal, accepted that ‘common assault as the base offence was not identified by name’.
Asked by the judges what actions could be regarded as common assault if identified, he replied: ‘The walking towards the cyclist, the gesticulation with her left arm towards the road, and the words “Get off the f****** pavement”.
‘Those words are capable of turning a gesture, and nothing more, into an unlawful act.’
The behaviour could have caused Mrs Ward, of Wyton, Cambridgeshire, to fear immediate unlawful force, leading her to veer away from Grey and into the road.
He added: ‘We say that is capable in law of amounting to an act of unlawful manslaughter.’
CCTV footage showed Celia Ward (pictured with her husband David) wobble into the road in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, where she was struck by a VW Passat
The 2020 incident had seen Grey rebuke Mrs Ward for driving on the pavement.
Retired midwife Mrs Ward veered into the road and into the path of a car that was unable to stop.
She was pronounced dead at the scene of the collision in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.
The terrible incident also changed the life of the driver, mother-of-two Carla Money who said she has been left so devastated that it has led to the breakup of her marriage and her suffering from PTSD.
Mrs Ward’s widower, retired RAF pilot David Ward, said in a statement read to the court by prosecutor Simon Spence KC during the trial that the ‘clip of Celia’s last moments will haunt me forever’.
‘Rarely a day goes by without thinking of her and our happy life together, but I can so easily burst into tears, as I have on so many occasions,’ he said.
The pair met in 1965 and in their retirement enjoyed playing golf and seeing the world on cruise holidays, the court was told.
‘I miss her terribly and after a year-and-a-half on my own felt the need to sell our house of 34 years and relocated to a retirement village near Romsey [in Hampshire],’ Mr Ward said.
