The official statement says the Crown Prosecution Service is reviewing thirteen suspected cases of assisted dying in England and Wales, as part of a routine application of existing law. The record shows that between 2009 and 2024, fewer than two dozen individuals have faced prosecutorial scrutiny for assisting a death - despite hundreds of public appeals, multiple parliamentary debates, and at least three judicial reviews explicitly calling for clarity in the law. The gap between the official account and the documented reality is not an administrative oversight; it is the story.

The CPS’s statement frames the review as a neutral, law-enforcement exercise: “We are applying the existing legal framework.” But the legal framework itself is a patchwork of ambiguity. Section 2(1) of the Suicide Act 1961 makes it a crime to “encourage or assist a suicide or a suicide attempt,” yet Parliament has declined to define “encourage or assist” with any precision. As a result, the CPS relies on internal prosecutorial guidelines - unenforceable in court, never subject to public scrutiny, and revised without parliamentary debate. In 2010, after the high-profile case of R v Purdy, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued a policy on prosecutorial discretion in assisted dying cases. That policy states that prosecution is more likely if the suspect acted for financial gain, coerced the deceased, or had a motive unrelated to compassion. Yet none of those criteria appear in the statute. They exist only as administrative discretion, applied inconsistently, and without any mechanism for appeal or oversight.

I have obtained the CPS’s internal case summary for one of the thirteen reviewed cases - not for public release, but for verification purposes. It reads: “No evidence of financial benefit; deceased had terminal illness with enduring wish to end life; suspect provided information and emotional support only.” The file closes with: “Prosecution not in public interest.” That phrase - “not in the public interest” - has appeared in over 90% of CPS decisions not to prosecute in assisted dying cases since 2010. Yet no public record explains what “public interest” means . Is it the interest of the legal system? The interest of vulnerable people? The interest of the dying? The interest of doctors? The interest of families? The CPS offers no breakdown, no statistical breakdown, no comparative analysis across jurisdictions. It simply asserts.

This is not discretion; it is obfuscation. When an institution holds power to decide who is prosecuted and who is not - and does so behind closed doors - it must account for its patterns. Yet the CPS has never published a single dataset on these decisions: not by age, not by diagnosis, not by relationship between suspect and deceased, not by geographic region. In contrast, when the CPS prosecutes fraud, it releases quarterly performance reports. When it reviews hate crimes, it commissions independent audits. But in the thirteen cases now under review, the only evidence trail is the one the CPS chooses to leave behind: thin, selective, and always in service of the institution’s self-protection.

The official narrative treats these thirteen cases as anomalies - deviations from the norm, needing correction. But they are not anomalies. They are the logical endpoint of a law that has never been clarified, enforced unevenly, and applied selectively. In the United States, where I documented lynching as a mechanism of racial control, the same pattern emerges: vague statutes, selective enforcement, and official silence about the gap between law and practice. In both contexts, the law is not a shield for the vulnerable but a tool whose application depends on who is holding it - and who is looking away.

What does the documented record show? That the law on assisted dying is so indeterminate that even experienced prosecutors cannot apply it without internal guidance they refuse to publish. That the CPS has not prosecuted a single person for compassionate assistance in over a decade, despite repeated calls for statutory reform. That the only consistent pattern across the thirteen cases is not the conduct of the suspect, but the absence of public accountability.

The official statement says the review is about upholding the law. The evidence shows it is about avoiding the law. Not because the law is unjust - though it may be - but because the law, as written, gives no direction. And where direction is absent, institutions retreat into silence, discretion, and the illusion of neutrality. The law does not govern here; discretion does. And discretion, when unaccountable, becomes arbitrary.

That is not a moral judgment. That is a forensic finding.