THE Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has said its mistaken sending of a suspect's taped police interview to an unconnected defendant was due to a "mislabelling" of the disc.
The Advertiser reported last week how a defendant from Waddon had received from the CPS the DVD containing the recording of an New Addington man being interviewed over criminal damage allegations.
A CPS spokeswoman said on Wednesday: "The CPS is responsible for serving prosecution evidence on the defence and the court in advance of criminal trials, including police interviews.
"Much of this is evidence provided by the police and they will ordinarily provide a copy for the CPS and a copy for each of the defendants.
"The CPS will check evidence that is disclosed to ensure we meet Data Protection Act obligations.
"Following a full investigation in this case we have established that the copy served on the defence was mislabelled when it was received by the CPS and contained information relating to another case.
"It was therefore wrongly assumed that, having reviewed one disc as part of the legal review process, this was a duplicate copy of the same evidence."
She added: "Although this was reported in court in August, this was not escalated to a senior manager and it appears no action was taken to retrieve the DVD until now, which is clearly unacceptable. This is a regrettable episode and clearly falls well short of the high standards the public rightly expect of us.
"We would like to assure Londoners that we take issues relating to data protection extremely seriously and have taken action internally to ensure this does not happen again, including reinforcing our obligations in this important area."
