Harry Dunn’s parents are no longer seeking to appeal against a High Court ruling that the US intelligence analyst who caused the teenage motorcyclist’s death by careless driving nearly five years ago was entitled to diplomatic immunity, their lawyers have told me.
The finding that Anne Sacoolas enjoyed immunity from UK criminal jurisdiction at the time of Harry’s death was not reached “with any enthusiasm for the result”, Lord Justice Flaux and Mr Justice Saini had said in 2020. But that conclusion, they added, was “compelled by the operation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations”.
Until now, it was thought that Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn might still have been hoping to overturn that decision in the Court of Appeal. But lawyers from the newly merged global law firm A&O Shearman confirmed last week that the appeal “wasn’t pursued in the end because of the way that the criminal proceedings panned out”.
In addition, the law had been changed so that anyone in Sacoolas’s position would not have been entitled to immunity in future.
This month, a coroner found that the motorcyclist’s death was caused by a collision with a car driven by Sacoolas. She had emerged from RAF Croughton, a US communications centre in Northamptonshire, and then driven instinctively on the wrong side of the road.
In response to the inquest verdict, the Foreign Office made a statement about road safety.
Andrew Denny, head of UK public law at A&O Shearman, and Frances Beddow, an associate at the firm’s London disputes team, were speaking for the first time about the thousands of hours of unpaid work done by lawyers and support staff at Allen & Overy, which merged with Shearman & Sterling last month. The two lawyers were able to speak to me because the inquest into Dunn’s death has now concluded.
You can listen to my interview with them by clicking on the ► symbol above. It’s the second “on-air pilot” for my new podcast, called A Lawyer Talks. The podcast will be launched in the autumn and in the meantime I am trying out various formats on an occasional basis. Comments are welcome.
The legal proceedings, with their unique complications, were particularly difficult to report over the years because none of the lawyers involved was willing to explain what was going on.
Even so, I secured the only interview on the case ever given by Sacoolas’s US lawyer. Amy Jeffress told me in 2021 that her client would never return to the United Kingdom. Although some of those working on the case believed otherwise, that proved to be true.
Some of the background was outlined by Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb in December 2022 when she gave Sacoolas a suspended sentence of eight months’ imprisonment.
Once a podcast episode appears on my Substack blog A Lawyer Writes, it is automatically distributed to other podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. My first podcast was published last Thursday and there is also an archive of other full-length audio recordings that I’ve made over the past four years. All podcasts can be downloaded for future listening. This episode, like the previous one released last Thursday, was produced by Neil Koenig.
Harry Dunn’s legacy