Prosecutor reflects on ‘long road' to justice for baby Victoria

Glasgow Times

3 days ago

On Monday, Victoria's parents, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, were convicted of her manslaughter following two lengthy trials spanning two years.
Samantha Yelland, senior Crown prosecutor for CPS London, told the PA news agency: 'I feel that justice has been done.
'It's been a long road, it's been a lot of work, but, you know, no work is too much when anyone's died, but particularly a young child who wasn't able to stick up for herself or fight for herself.'
Crown Prosecution Service senior prosecutor Samantha Yelland (Emily Pennink/PA)
Last year, a jury failed to reach verdicts on whether the defendants were responsible to Victoria's death but did convict them of concealing her birth, child cruelty and perverting the course of justice by hiding her body in a shed.
Ms Yelland sought a retrial on charges of manslaughter and causing or allowing Victoria's death in the public interest, even though it meant a second six-month trial.
Explaining the decision, she said: 'A baby died in circumstances which she absolutely didn't need to and could have been avoided.
'That is why it's serious and it needs to be prosecuted. Obviously none of us expected it to take this long.'
Dealing with a case involving the death of a baby is 'always upsetting' even for an experienced team, she said.
Phd students during tests replicating conditions in which Victoria died in a tent (Met Police/PA)
Ms Yelland said: 'I consider it a privilege to prosecute baby cases. It is very upsetting, it could be harrowing, but usually the people charged with their killing is someone who is supposed to look after them.
'Some of the evidence in is not very nice, but we're just looking at the whole picture and wanting to get justice for the person who has died.'
Images of Victoria's body found rotting amid rubbish in a Lidl bag in a shed near Brighton have stuck in her mind throughout the case.
She said: 'I've seen what baby Victoria looks like inside of that bag. I've seen the post-mortem photos.
'We didn't subject the jury to that because that is not a nice thing to see. But the baby is in that bag, which we know she was carried around in when she died, but also when she was alive. It is probably what stays with me the most. And what was on top, the rubbish, the Coke can and the sandwich wrapper.
'And the two police officers finding it. You can see how moved they are when they realise that they found it. Obviously, that had been a manhunt been going on for a couple of days by that stage.'
A pink sheet and Victoria's teddy bear motif babygro were found inside a Lidl bag with her body (Met Police/PA)
On the defendants' actions after four other children were taken into care, Ms Yelland said: 'We never said that they didn't love their children, but when it comes to decision making, it's the prosecution view that they think of themselves above the children.
'And that's why they got themselves into the predicament they did. And that's why Victoria died, and that's why they continued to keep her there in that bag for however long it was after she died and not go to the police and not explain the situation.
'And that's why I charged perverting the course of justice rather than preventing the lawful for burial, which is another offence I could have considered.
'For me, it was more than that because they kept it for such a long time that the state that she was in was such that we couldn't be sure if there had been an injury – not that we're saying there was for a minute – but we wouldn't have been able to tell because at the amount of time that she'd been in there.
'I do accept that there were experts that said that everyone grieves differently and everyone deals with things differently, but I think the whole theme of this case is that they think about themselves more than they think about their children and other people.'
Ms Yelland said the case had presented multiple challenges for the prosecution before baby Victoria was found dead on March 1 2023.
Tests on the tent supported the prosecution case Victoria died from cold (Met Police/PA)
Discussions had already started about charging Gordon and Marten even in the absence of a body.
The CPS pressed ahead with charges despite a post-mortem examination failing to ascertain exactly how Victoria died.
With no pathological cause of death, the jury was asked to look at other evidence that Victoria died from hypothermia or smothering, as the defendants claimed.
Ms Yelland said: 'We decided that although there were two distinct ways in which she may have died, our main case is that she died of hypothermia.
'The defendants raised that she was smothered and in response to that, we say, while we don't accept that, even if that were to be the case, the circumstances in which she was smothered are such it still amounts to grossly negligence manslaughter.
CCTV footage of Constance Marten holding baby Victoria under her coat in East Ham, London (Met Police/PA)
'It's our case that hypothermia would have been heavily involved in any smothering anyway, because she's been subjected to very cold conditions with the items that she was wearing and would not have been as healthy.'
In a change from the original trial, an expert replicated cold and damp conditions in the tent where Victoria died and examined her inadequate clothes pointing to hypothermia being the likely cause.
Other challenges involved piecing together and assessing sightings of the defendants from across England in the seven weeks they were on the run with baby Victoria.
Mr Yelland said that the prosecution was able to narrow the timeline in the second trial although the prosecution still asserted Victoria survived for longer than the defendants had said.
Towards the end of the retrial, Gordon, who by then was representing himself, provided the prosecution with the chance to lift the lid on his 1989 rape conviction in the United States after he gave a misleading impression of his childhood.
When he refuted the convictions, the prosecution moved swiftly to produce an embossed certificate from a Florida court to prove it.