A fifth person who faced a Met Police prosecution after attending the vigil for Sarah Everard will be cleared of wrongdoing as the case against him is abandoned by prosecutors.
Ben Wheeler, 22, was accused of breaching Covid regulations on March 13 last year, when he joined a crowd of people at the bandstand in Clapham Common.
The spontaneous vigil, during the third national pandemic lockdown, took place ten days after Ms Everard has been kidnapped and killed by a serving police officer.
There was angry scenes when some at the vigil were challenged and detained by police officers, with one woman pictured being pinned to the ground.
When news broke that some of the vigil attendees faced criminal prosecution and had been convicted in secretive court hearings, the Met faced fresh outrage at its handling of the vigil and the aftermath of Ms Everard’s death.
Mr Wheeler, from Kennington, Dania Al-Obeid, 27, from Stratford, and Kevin Godin-Prior, 68, from Manchester, were all convicted in behind closed-doors-hearings in June, when they were each ordered to pay a £220 fine and £134 in costs and fees.
Vivien Hohmann, 21, from Clapham, and Jeni Edmunds, 32, of Lewisham, both entered not guilty pleas and vowed to fight the charges at trial.
But when the CPS took over the cases from the Met, the convictions against Mr Godin-Prior and Ms Al-Obeid – who both said they were unaware that they had been prosecuted – were overturned.
The CPS then dropped the cases against them as well as Ms Hohmann and Ms Edmunds.
City of London magistrates agreed on September 2 to re-open the case against Mr Wheeler, but the charge was not immediately dropped by the CPS.
He entered a not guilty plea and the case was scheduled for a trial in November.
When the Evening Standard asked if the case against Mr Wheeler was actually being pursued at trial, the CPS took two weeks to reply before a spokesperson confirmed: “We reviewed the case and concluded that our legal test for prosecution was not met.”
The final vigil attendee who was charged with a criminal offence, Jade Spence, 33, of Lambeth, was convicted and fined £300 and plus £144 in costs and fees.
The conviction – from June - still stands despite the collapse of the other cases, but Spence could still apply to re-open the case.
The prosecutions were all originally brought through the Single Justice Procedure, which allows magistrates to convict and sentence in behind-closed-doors hearings based on the written evidence alone.
The process has faced significant criticism and been labelled “conveyor belt justice”, with fears that mistakes are made when cases are dealt with quickly and concerns that high numbers of defendants do not engage with the justice process.
Ms Al-Obeid is now taking legal action against the Met Police over the way she was treated at the vigil and then prosecuted. She says she only learned of the criminal case against her from a journalist, shortly before she was convicted.
Met Police officers submitted several pages of witness statements to support the allegations that Covid restrictions had been breached at the vigil.
But the case was undermined by a series of court rulings which made it clear that Scotland Yard had misinterpreted the Covid laws and not given enough consideration to the human rights of assembly and free speech.
