Chelsea striker Sam Kerr has been cleared of racially aggravated abuse after calling a Scotland Yard officer ‘stupid and white’ during a heated row at a police station.
The 31-year-old Australian football star directed the comments at PC Stephen Lovell when she was taken to the station by a taxi driver after she was sick in his vehicle and her fiancée smashed its window.
Kerr told jurors she feared she and US international Kristie Mewis were being kidnapped by the driver, and she made the comments because PC Lovell was failing to listen to them or understand his privileged position.
She was acquitted by a jury at Kingston Crown Court after just over four hours’ deliberations.
And experts questioned why the trial had been prioritised amid a record 85,000 criminal case backlog, and why a top silk had been appointed to prosecute.
The Crown’s case was presented by Bill Emlyn Jones KC, but experts said that such an offence would normally have been prosecuted by a junior barrister at a much smaller expense.
Analysis indicates that it would have cost the Crown Prosecution Service as much as £12,000 for Mr Emlyn Jones’ services across the trial – whereas a junior would have been roughly £4,000.
A senior barrister, who asked not to be named, said: ‘That is the CPS giving away an extra £8,000 to lose, which was inevitable.’
Another leading lawyer said: ‘Cases this leave those in the criminal justice system incandescent when the CPS claims it doesn’t have enough money to increase fees to pay for people to prosecute violent offences.’
The CPS initially refused to authorise charges against Kerr, but did so after PC Lovell updated his initial statement to add that her words had left him ‘shocked, upset, and…feeling humiliated.’
In a statement issued on Tuesday evening, Sam Kerr said: ‘Following today’s not guilty verdict, I can finally put this challenging period behind me.
‘While I apologise for expressing myself poorly on what was a traumatic evening, I have always maintained that I did not intend to insult or harm anyone and I am thankful that the jury unanimously agreed.
‘I would like to thank my partner Kristie, my family, friends and all the fans for their love and support, especially those who attended court each day.
‘I am fully focused on getting back on to the pitch and look forward to an exciting year ahead for me and my family.’
Former victims’ commissioner Dame Vera Baird questioned whether the case was a priority, given rape victims are waiting up to six years for their cases to reach trial.
‘It just seems to me this was a low priority case so to have accelerated it through the courts and appointed a KC to prosecute seems unusual,’ she said.
‘Clearly the police should be treated with respect and of course it is possible that this officer was upset by her words – but was this really a priority case?
‘Given there was no threat from the individual, given there was no victim who suffered serious harm, was there really enough public interest in rushing through this case?’
Kerr, who wore white zip-up shirt and black trousers, emerged from the dock with a smile on her face after the verdict was read and gave a thumbs up to her barrister Grace Forbes.
Her fiancée Mewis, who is expecting the couple’s baby in November, broke down in tears in the well of the court.
During the trial, Kerr denied using ‘whiteness as an insult’ during the episode at Twickenham Police Station in southwest London on January 30, 2023.
She said the taxi driver began to ‘drive dangerously’ after she was sick, and she believed she and Mewis were being abducted in the same way that Sarah Everard had been two years’ previously.
Of the argument in the police station she claimed: ‘I was trying to express that due to the power and privilege they had, they would never have to understand what we had just gone through and the fear we were having for our lives.’
A CPS spokesman said: ‘The Crown Prosecution Service’s function is not to decide whether a person is guilty of a criminal offence, but to make fair, independent and objective assessments about whether it is appropriate to present charges for a jury to consider.
‘In this case, we decided that there was sufficient evidence and that it was in the public interest to proceed.
‘We respect the jury’s decision.’
