Sasha Wass KC (born 19 February 1958) is a British judge, prosecutor and defender.
Her father, Sir Douglas Wass, was a senior civil servant.[1] She obtained a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Liverpool and has been practising criminal law at the Bar for over four decades, having been called in 1981 and taking silk in 2000. She was appointed Recorder of the Crown Court in 1997, and a Recorder of the Central Criminal Court in 2008. She is part of the Chambers of Simon Denison KC 6KBW.[2][3][4]
Wass has more recently participated in BBCs Murder, Mystery and My Family, reviewing historical verdicts in criminal trials from a prosecutor's perspective, testing the evidence against today's conviction standards and submitting findings to a retired Judge.[5] Whilst the trial reviews cannot reverse past verdicts, they can help families to come to terms with the potential miscarriages of justice many decades ago.
As a senior criminal barrister and formerly a QC she had helped to prosecute high profile cases, ranging from killer Rosemary West through to and including Rolf Harris[6] and she successfully advised the disgraced financier Roger Levitt on his plea bargain deal with the SFO; she was credited with saving Levitt from serving jail time by him agreeing to community service orders.[3][7]
Wass successfully fought and won a full apology arising from her 2018 libel action against the Mail on Sunday for an article by David Rose containing profoundly false accusations that they had published about her in 2016.[8][9]
In 2020, Wass successfully defended her corporate client, News Group Newspapers, publishers of the U.K. Sun, against a libel action brought by U.S. actor Johnny Depp. Depp gave five days of testimony in London's High Court and was cross-examined by Wass, who sought to persuade the Court that Depp had abused his ex-wife Amber Heard, during their relationship. The Sun as publisher, had claimed Depp was a "wife-beater" in the article by then Executive Editor, Dan Wootton.[10][11]
In 2024, Wass lost her case for Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Britain's richest far right extremist, for contempt of court.
References
edit- ^ "Sir Douglas Wass obituary | Civil service". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 July 2021.
- ^ "Sasha Wass KC".
- ^ a b "Sasha Wass > Chambers of Simon Denison QC > London > England | Lawyer Profile". www.legal500.com. Retrieved 12 July 2021.
- ^ "PDF Sasha Wass".
- ^ "BBC One - Murder, Mystery and My Family - Episode guide". BBC. Retrieved 12 July 2021.
- ^ "Rolf Harris prosecutor Sasha Wass Queen's Counsel has history of working on high-profile cases". NewsComAu. 1 July 2014. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
- ^ "How the Levitt deal was hammered out". The Independent. 22 October 2011. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
- ^ Cross2018-06-13T08:35:00+01:00, Michael. "QC wins apology and damages for 'buried evidence' libel". Law Gazette. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ "Sasha Wass QC – top criminal QC secures full Court apology from Mail on Sunday". Carter-Ruck. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
- ^ "Factbox: Johnny Depp's libel case - The evidence so far". Reuters. 19 July 2020. Retrieved 18 December 2022.
- ^ "Depp loses libel case over Sun 'wife beater' claim". BBC News. 2 November 2020. Retrieved 18 December 2022.
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