The elderly victim was in a poor state when he arrived at A&E at the Royal Free Hospital in London. A burly young man had broken up to eight of his ribs. He had marks on his arms from trying to fight the man off. He was badly shaken: the ordeal would change his life.
The victim was Professor John Sutherland, the 86-year-old emeritus professor of English at University College, London, author of more than 20 books on Victorian and 20th-century literature. The twist is that the burly man who broke his ribs was a policeman.
There were further twists; the policeman, PC Sam Wilks, was then charged with GBH by prosecutors who, at least initially, considered that he had, in effect, assaulted the older man while performing chest compressions (CPR) on him while he was awake and breathing. And then—yet another twist!—the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped the case five days before it was due to be heard, and a full year after Wilks had initially been charged.
PC Wilks insists he intended no harm, and was merely trying to save a man’s life. Nevertheless the case raises important questions—not least over the injuries caused when a medical doctor was present, and the strange behaviour of the CPS.
I met up with Sutherland recently, and he told me what happened in May 2023 when he and his wife, the photographer Sarah Lee, decided to take a Tube journey from Mornington Crescent to Hampstead in north London to have dinner. Once on the train, Sutherland felt faint, and Sarah helped him off at Chalk Farm.
She called for help, and a young female doctor wearing a hijab, Dr Falak Naqvi, began asking for his medical history. (It subsequently turned out that Sutherland had had a vasovagal episode, or common faint.) But she was interrupted by Wilks, who was off duty at the time. He produced a warrant card and took control, despite Lee saying, “She’s a doctor, will you back off?”
There was a flurry of action. The (faulty) station defibrillator was sent for. An ambulance was called. Sutherland was breathing and talking: the colour was apparently coming back into his face, according to Lee. Meanwhile, PC Wilks warned him he was about to perform CPR and that he might break some ribs.
“I had had a couple of these faints before,” says Sutherland. “It’s like a guardsman fainting on parade because they haven’t had breakfast. But, anyway, [Wilks] got to work and he wouldn’t stop. He was determined. I could feel my bones cracking. And then I finally screamed out, ‘Kill me. I can't stand the pain any longer.’ I have a high pain threshold, but this was too much.”
Lee was horrified at what she was watching. “John was scrabbling and thrashing about, trying to stop the compressions. I grabbed PC Wilks’ arm really hard, looked him in the eye and forcefully said something like, ‘I don’t care that you’re a police officer. If you don’t stop, I will push you on the tracks.’ He seemed to ignore me and continued with the compressions despite the fact that both John and I were forcefully telling him to stop.”
Sutherland, recalls the episode. “My son works in security. He says even bouncers do a three-day course, and they know that you don’t do that to people who are talking to you. You don’t start breaking their ribs, particularly when they are on the ground as I was.”
“I was 84 years old, but I could walk 20,000 steps a day. I’d go to the gym four times a week. I could press 70 pounds. I felt humiliated. It was extremely painful and felt degrading.”
Eventually, Wilks did stop. Paramedics arrived. Lee says she saw Wilks “shuffling off, he was in tears; his face and eyes were red, and he was sobbing”. In the end, Wilks was not required to tell his side of the story in court, and the Metropolitan Police has answered questions on his behalf. We may never know what his explanation was.
Sutherland was taken to A&E. His hospital admission noted “assault/chest compressions ..done WHILST AWAKE !!!” The emeritus professor takes note of the significance of the exclamation marks.
The British Transport Police decided to prosecute Wilks in May 2024. He was charged with GBH—rather than, say, common assault—because consent to the use of physical force through CPR had been withdrawn. He appeared in a magistrates’ court the following month.
The case was due to be heard in the Crown Court on 27th May. But five days before the trial—and weeks after the routine case management and pre-trial preparation hearings—the CPS decided to drop the case.
The CPS cannot explain why the decision came so late in the day, merely that eventually “we concluded there was no realistic prospect of conviction.” The Met, on Wilks’s behalf, said: “There is no evidence to suggest he had an ill intent. He believed he was trying to save a life.” It’s been decided that he has no case to answer in relation to any misconduct, and he’s returned to operational duties. Case closed.
And yet. The affair leaves a nasty taste in the mouth for four reasons. Firstly, it raises the question of what kind of first aid training police officers receive. If your average bouncer knows not to perform CPR on any patient—never mind an 84-year-old one—who is breathing and conscious, then is it too much to expect that a policeman should have learned the same? And, once a patient evidently withdraws consent, how can it be correct to carry on? Are such things taught in police training school? I asked the Met, and there was no answer.
In Sutherland’s view—expressed in a witness statement—“I think he behaved ignorantly and made the wrong decisions. In the face of a medical emergency, he overruled a doctor.” The Met counters by saying Wilks “had every reason to believe this was a life-threatening medical episode”.
Secondly, what’s happening at the CPS if a case like this can be pursued right to the door of the court, and then dropped? Insufficient care? Inexperienced staff? Pressed for resources? I asked the CPS and there was no answer.
Thirdly, why didn’t the police have Wilks in, discuss the case with him and suggest an apology to Sutherland and his wife and then decide if additional training was appropriate? They left Wilks facing serious criminal charges for a year, and that cannot have been easy for him.
Finally, was there some sort of unconscious bias that led an off-duty policeman to place himself at the centre of the action, even though a (female, Muslim) doctor was at the scene? That was certainly Lee’s impression of what was happening. I asked the Met for a response on Wilks’s behalf: there was none.
The day after Sutherland’s case had been due to be heard, two officers were coincidentally found not guilty of assault after a wheelchair-bound, 92-year-old single-legged amputee was pepper-sprayed and Tasered. This, again, raises questions of what sort of training police have these days.
“My whole life has been based on the fact that I had two police officers for parents,” says Sutherland. “I believed in the kind of work they did. I believed, ultimately, that they were there to really make a better, better world… and there I was, sort of being brutalised.”
Sutherland says the incident has robbed him of a sense of independence. He has reduced physical mobility and has given up lecturing, which he had been doing for 50 years or more. He expects his life expectancy to have been significantly shortened.
The Met says it recognises “the unintended impact” on his life.
What would he like from PC Wilks? An apology? An explanation? “An expression of hope that I’d got over it, and what an awful night it was for both of us.”
That seems unlikely. It takes a lot for the Met to apologise. If you ask the police whether there are any lessons to be learned from the ordeal of Professor Sutherland, the answer comes back: there are none.
