A woman who shouted and waved at a cyclist, causing her to fall into the path of a moving car, has had her manslaughter conviction overturned.
Auriol Grey, 50, was seen on CCTV shouting at the 77-year-old cyclist, Celia Ward, to “get off the fucking pavement” as she approached her in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, in October 2020.
Ward, a grandmother and retired midwife, veered into the road and died after she was struck by a car.
Grey, who has cerebral palsy and partial blindness, denied manslaughter but was found guilty after a retrial and was jailed for three years in March 2023.
On Wednesday the court of appeal in London overturned her conviction after her lawyers argued she was a vulnerable pedestrian who “should never have been charged”.
Dame Victoria Sharp, sitting with Mrs Justice Yip and Mrs Justice Farbey, said: “We have no hesitation in concluding that the appellant’s conviction for manslaughter is unsafe.”
In a statement after the ruling, Grey’s family said: “While we welcome the decision of the court of appeal, our thoughts today are also with the Ward family and I am sure a day doesn’t go by when they don’t remember their tragic loss.
“There has been unnecessary and prolonged suffering and vulnerable people like Auriol need better support from the justice system – we hope lessons will be learned.”
The court was told that Grey, who attended the hearing after she was granted bail earlier this year, was charged with unlawful act manslaughter, which requires an unlawful action to take place that caused death. Her lawyers told appeal judges that no such “base offence” was ever identified at the trial and that Grey’s actions were only referred to as “hostile gesticulation”.
Adrian Darbishire KC, representing Grey, said in the appeal: “Hostile gesticulation is not a crime, otherwise we would have 50,000 football fans each weekend being apprehended.”
Simon Spence KC, on behalf of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) argued the base offence was common assault, although this had not been identified by name during the trial.
When asked what actions could have been deemed common assault, Spence said: “The walking towards the cyclist, the gesticulation with her left arm towards the road and the words ‘get off the fucking pavement’. Those words are capable of turning a gesture and nothing more into an unlawful act.”
In the judgment, Sharp said: “Had Mrs Ward not died, we regard it as inconceivable that the appellant would have been charged with assault.”
Grey’s legal team, from the firm Hickman and Rose, said in a statement after the ruling: “Ms Grey simply should never have been charged. Misconceived prosecutions and wrongful convictions such as this cause untold pain to all those affected, including the family of the deceased, as well as the person wrongly accused.”
The statement added that Ward “should never have been faced with the choice between cycling on the pavement or cycling on a busy and dangerous ring road”.
“Had a clear and well-signed cycle path been in place, safely separating vulnerable pedestrians such as Ms Grey, this accident would never have occurred,” they said.
A previous court of appeal bid to reduce Grey’s sentence on the grounds that she had recently been diagnosed as autistic and that this might have affected the outcome of her case, was rejected last May.
After the judges had given their ruling, Spence asked for the case to be sent back to the crown court for a retrial, which was denied.
