Disabled people failed by courts and police

Christine Lakinski lay dying on her doorstep when Anthony Anderson decided to urinate on her. Ms Lakinski, a severely disabled woman, had been walking back from her local shops, in Hartlepool, with a box of laminate flooring when she collapsed.

She managed to crawl to her front door and that was when Anderson spotted her. Rather than call for an ambulance he covered Ms Lakinski in cold water and shaving foam before finally urinating on her motionless body.

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Egged on by friends, who filmed the ordeal on their phones, Anderson shouted: "This is YouTube material!" By the time someone called the paramedics Ms Lakinski could not be saved; she died on 27 July 2007.

Anderson, then 27, was not charged for Ms Lakinski's death because an autopsy showed that she had died from pancreatic failure. Instead he was charged with and convicted of outraging public decency. The judge called his actions "shocking" and sentenced him to three years in prison.

But campaigners believe his sentence would have been stiffer had Anderson's crime been investigated under hate-crime legislation, which was expanded three years ago to protect disabled people. They believe that Ms Lakinski's case and many others like it reveal how the police and the Crown Prosecution Service are systematically failing to investigate and prosecute hate crimes, despite the change in the law.

Ms Lakinski may not have been murdered by her abusers but others have. A year before she collapsed on her doorstep, Steven Hoskins, a 39-year-old man with severe learning difficulties, was found dead at the bottom of St Austell's railway viaduct in Cornwall. He had been murdered by "friends" who often burned him with cigarettes while hauling him around his bedsit wearing a dog collar. He died when Darren Stewart, 29, Sarah Bullock, 16, and Martin Pollard, 21, walked Mr Hoskins to the edge of the viaduct. Bullock then made him fall by kicking his face and hands. She and Stewart were convicted of murder while Pollard went down for manslaughter. The three had clearly harassed Mr Hoskins because of his learning difficulties, but neither the police nor the CPS treated his murder as a hate crime.

Since 2005, disability hate crimes have been recognised within the criminal justice system. Although it is not a separate offence, a "sentencing provision" was created which imposed a duty on the courts to increase the sentence for any offence aggravated by hostility towards the victim based on their disability. In murder cases where hate is a factor the "tariff" imposed by judges before a murderer can be considered for parole can be significantly increased. But charities believe that unlike race-hate crimes, which are subject to a similar provision, police and the courts fail repeatedly to take disability hate crimes into account when prosecuting and sentencing criminals.

In one case, where Brent Martin, 22, was kicked, punched and beaten to death last year for a £5 bet, appeal court judges in June even reduced sentences for his killers – William Hughes, 22, Marcus Miller, 16, and Stephen Bonallie, 17 – because Mr Martin's murder was not "sadistic".

Disability Now, published by the charity Scope, has outlined details of more than 50 cases, most of which involved physical violence, where they believe people were targeted because of their disability but which the police or courts have declined to prosecute as hate crimes. Only three of these were investigated as hate crimes. "Disabled people frequently report that their disability was a factor in the crimes committed against them," says Katherine Quarmby, who compiled the dossier. "Despite this, the overwhelming majority of these incidents are not investigated, prosecuted or sentenced as disability hate crimes."

Campaigners also believe that the courts are not taking the murder of disabled people as seriously as they do for racist or homophobic murders.

A report released recently by Scope, Getting Away With Murder: Disabled people's experiences of hate crime in the UK, compares the disparity between sentences for those convicted of racially motivated or homophobic homicides during 2005 and 2006 with incidents where disabled people have been killed. Scope found that the sentences handed down to the murderers of disabled men in a similar period were consistently lower, and their murders were not treated as hate crimes.

Keith Shortman, 60, experienced disability hate crime was attacked by teenagers close to his home in Camden Town, London. He said: "They could see that I was different and just picked on me in the street. I was kicked and punched and I told them I was disabled but they continued until I fell on the ground. It was terrifying ... They just ran off laughing. I called the police and an ambulance but I didn't see any of their faces. It is the only the time I have been attacked physically but I'm quite used to being shouted out or called names. If you heard someone being called names because of their colour you would be disgusted wouldn't you? The same rules don't seem to apply for people like me."

Alice Maynard, the chairman of Scope, calls this a "crisis of justice" for disabled people. "Despite the horrific crimes documented in this report, disability hate crime remains largely invisible – its existence is frequently denied and disabled people who report it are, all too often ignored or are dismissed as unreliable witnesses," she says.

There are 11 million people in the UK registered as disabled but measuring the prevalence of disability hate crimes is difficult because the police and CPS have only recently begun to log them. Campaigners believe the shortage of disability hate crime prosecutions is not because disabled people are afraid or unwilling to report crimes. "The issue of not being believed stretches all the way to prosecution level," says Anna Bird, the policy officer at the mental health charity Mind. "[Our] legal advice line hears frequent reports of cases being dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service before they even reach court, because evidence given by witnesses with mental health problems can be discredited as unreliable."

Mind believes that police officers need to be better trained to deal with people who have mental health problems and to recognise when a disability hate crime has been committed. "Police aren't mental health experts and if they do not identify a vulnerability or 'hate' element of a crime from the outset ... it is highly unlikely to be prosecuted as a disability hate crime," says Ms Bird, adding: "The CPS needs to be more proactive in asking for further evidence when a prosecutor does not have sufficient information about the motivation of the crime."

A CPS spokeswoman said: "We are aware of the concerns of various mental health organisations and we are very much taking these concerns on board." She added that Sir Ken Macdonald, the director of public prosecutions at the CPS, is to give a speech to the Bar Council and the Equality and Diversity Forum today in which he would "talk about the way disability hate crimes are prosecuted and what the CPS will be doing to improve performance in the future".

Ms Lakinski's brother, Mark, believes the only reason his sister was subjected to such a horrific ordeal was because she was disabled and that what Anderson did was a hate crime. "If an ambulance had been called when Christine had collapsed she might have died with dignity and with pain relief in hospital and not on a dirty pavement, violated at the moment of her death by a braying bunch of louts who, I firmly believe, saw her as an easy target because she was disabled," he said.

"No mention of disability hate crime was ever brought up by officials dealing with this law case although Christine was visibly disabled."

Victims of hate

*Christopher Foulkes: Murdered, 8 March 2007, North Wales. A teenage attacker threw a blanket over the 39-year-old wheelchair user before beating him to death in his home.

*Rikki Judkins: Robbed and murdered, 17 June 2006, Lancaster.

The 50-year-old man with learning difficulties from Coventry was robbed, beaten and left to die in a subway by two thieves.

*Fiona Pilkington: Driven to suicide, 26 October 2007, Leicestershire. Tormented by youths, she and her daughter, who had severe learning difficulties, were found dead in a car fire.

*Barrie-John Horrell: Abducted and killed, 12 July 2006, Wales. Two 'friends' put a pillowcase over the mentally-impaired 31-year old's head, then beat him to death with a brick before setting the body on fire.

*Christine Lakinski: Humiliated and left to die, 26 July 2007, Hartlepool. An ex-soldier urinated on the mentally and physically impaired 50-year old woman as she lay dying on the street outside her home after collapsing.

*David Raymond Atherton: Bullied, beaten and drowned, 12 May 2006, Warrington. Two teenagers attacked the 40-year old, who had learning difficulties, and threw him into a river.

*Robert Griffiths: Murdered, 12 November 2007, Doncaster. The wheelchair-bound 56-year old man died from severe burns and smoke inhalation after a suspected arson attack at his home.

*Steven Hoskin: Tortured and murdered, 6 July 2006, Cornwall. The mentally impaired 39-year old was led around on a dog lead by a gang who pushed him off a viaduct.

*Craig Robins: Attacked, 31 July 2007, Birmingham. A gang of 30 youths repeatedly stabbed the 28-year-old wheelchair-user in the face and neck and beat him with a brick, leaving him in a coma.