Prosecutors decided not to charge Akorede Odutayo’s partner until police appealed – one in a string of such cases, officers say

A woman who was left permanently blind in one eye by her violent fiance has criticised the Crown Prosecution Service after her case was initially dropped despite “overwhelming evidence” of the cause of her injuries.



Akorede Odutayo sustained life-changing injuries after being punched repeatedly in the face by her partner when she got icing on his clothes after presenting him with a birthday cake.

Police from the London borough that worked on the case say it is just one in a string of domestic abuse offences they had to appeal against to get through the courts after the CPS initially declined to press charges.

Ibrahim Akanbi was found guilty of grievous bodily harm last month at Woolwich crown court in London and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Ibrahim Akanbi. Photograph: Police Handout

He would have escaped a conviction had police not appealed against a decision by the CPS last March to take no further action in the case.

Now Odutayo, 23, who has a two-year-old son with Akanbi, has decided to speak out because she is worried other victims are not getting the justice they deserve. She said: “I feel I was completely failed by the CPS. If the police hadn’t appealed he could have got away with it despite the blatant evidence.”

Odutayo said she had endured a “painful waiting game” to see her former partner brought to justice after the attack on 11 January 2015, Akanbi’s birthday.

The couple were packing for a holiday Odutayo had booked as a surprise when a row erupted after she put icing pieces from his birthday cake in his cupboard as a keepsake.



“He started chucking things at me and headbutted me, cutting his head on my tooth,” she said. Odutayo, who had been on FaceTime to her sister at the time, added: “He then started punching me repeatedly and I ran to pick up the phone and screamed to my sister, but he chased me and started hitting me over and over until my face went numb. My eye was full of blood. There was blood all over my house, my clothes, the wall, the bed, it looked like a murder scene.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Akorede Odutayo after the attack. Photograph: Handout

After spending three days in hospital undergoing surgery, doctors told Odutayo they had been unable to save the sight in her eye.

She said: “I’ve lost my eye and then I find out they weren’t even going to charge him. He should have been on remand, he could have come back and taken my right eye. He was out there going on holiday and enjoying his life while I was going through hell.”

She said Akanbi apologised for his actions in a text message the day after the attack and admitted he was in “one thousand per cent trouble”.

A police source told the Guardian: “The defendant blinded his partner and even admitted to punching her ‘two or three’ times and causing the injury. He was arrested on the night of the attack and should have been charged and remanded due to overwhelming evidence. It was an elementary case.



“Instead, the CPS decided to take no further action. It was such a perverse decision that we had to challenge their legal advice.

“We are seeing too many domestic abuse cases being dropped at the slight hint of a problem, but most officers don’t have the time or expertise to lodge an appeal.”

A crown prosecutor told police the CPS made the initial decision not to press charges in 2015 because Akanbi had stated it was Odutayo who had headbutted him and he had acted in self-defence.

However, after the police appealed, and following a review, the CPS applied charges of GBH with intent and a jury later found Akanbi guilty of the lesser charge of GBH.

The CPS said that the police did not refer the crime to their prosecutors until six weeks after the incident. It also said the “key evidence” needed to proceed with a prosecution, including typed witness statements, was only provided by police in April 2016.

Responding to claims made about the Akanbi case, the CPS said: “At the outset of the case, we requested the evidence necessary to make a charging decision. When this was provided by the police, in April 2016, prosecutors made the decision to charge within a week.”

The CPS said police had appealed against only a tiny fraction of all pre-charging decisions it had made. Nationally, CPS Direct provided pre-charging advice in 395,298 cases between April 2015 and September 2016 and only 1,210 appeals were made by police during this time. However, nearly half of these – 549 – were upheld.

Sentencing Akanbi on 16th December, the recorder David Etherington QC referred to messages he had sent Odutayo after the assault.

“Those text messages are very, very revealing because she points out that you headbutted her and that it was repeated punching and neither of those two things do you deny,” he said. “These events were going on in the near proximity of your two-year-old child. That is absolutely disgraceful … These are things he’s got to live with as he grows up and that his own dad did to his mother.”

Sentencing Akanbi to three years, Etherington added it was “one of the most serious category 2 cases that I had to consider because of the degree of injury”.

Dipa Patel, a London-based independent domestic violence advocate who supported Odutayo throughout her case, said: “He got three years and will probably serve half, which is hardly a reflection of what he has done. How can women feel they will get justice when you consider this case?”

Patel said she was shocked when police told her the CPS had initially declined to charge Akanbi. “I was extremely distressed when I heard that, especially when you consider they had a doctor’s report stating she was blinded by this injury. Then there were the incriminating messages and FaceTime records,” she said.

“There was solid evidence to show this man was not only a danger to the victim, but to society. You didn’t need to be a trained lawyer to see that.”

Police in Greenwich said the case was just one in a string of domestic violence cases they had appealed against after the CPS initially decided to take no further action. They said they went on to achieve guilty pleas and convictions in a handful of cases last year after charges had been applied on review by a senior prosecutor.

A couple who attacked a disabled woman with a dog chain and a man who broke into his former partner’s home with a knife and threatened to kill her in front of her young children are among those who would have escaped punishment had their cases not been reviewed on appeal, officers have alleged.

In London, a record 18,876 cases of domestic abuse were put forward to the CPS in 2015-2016, but charges were only applied in 55% of them – the lowest rate in the country and 10% below the next lowest rate out of 43 police forces. The highest rate was in Leicestershire, where the CPS pursued 82% of cases brought by police.

DI Lee Barnard, who works in the Met police’s domestic abuse policy unit, said: “The volume is increasing in terms of what we are putting through but we are still 10% below the national average for convictions.”

Several officers across London’s community safety units have claimed in feedback to the domestic violence unit to be struggling to cope with “woeful shortcomings” in CPS charging advice and response times to domestic abuse cases.

Polly Neate, the chief executive of Women’s Aid, said while the CPS was making progress with domestic abuse cases on a national level, the London statistics were unacceptable.

She said: “There is a bit of a lottery in the response to domestic abuse depending on where you live in the country, but the challenges are the same everywhere. The police and CPS in London should be working together to enable more successful prosecutions.”



The Guardian has approached the Metropolitan Police head office for an official response.

• This article was amended on 27 January 2017. An earlier version quoted a police source as saying the CPS granted Akanbi bail. The CPS later confirmed to the Guardian that it was the police who granted bail. This has been corrected.