Teenager Max Coopey walks free after conviction overturned

The 19-year-old, who hit the headlines when a lack of evidence meant police were unable to prosecute him in connection with the deaths of two men he knocked down and killed while high on cannabis, lodged an appeal from jail when a District Judge sent him to prison for three months for a later incident of driving whilst disqualified and having no insurance.

A judge and two magistrates presided over that appeal and decided the prosecution evidence of a PCSO who said he saw Mr Coopey driving following his disqualification, was not reliable and ordered the now blond-haired Coopey to be released from his jail sentence and for his convictions to be quashed.

The judge quashed Coopey's conviction after stating the special constable who said he saw him driving while disqualified and uninsured, could have experienced "confirmation bias" because he had been briefed that the teenager was flouting his ban.

Coopey became well-known when he drove his Metropolitan Police Sergeant father's car into two pedestrians while high on cannabis, killing them both on the evening of August 2018.

It was the second time he had been drug-driving in the space of eight weeks, having been pulled over in the early hours of June 10, 2018. He was found to be over two times the drug drive limit, not licensed to drive and uninsured.

While Coopey was released under investigation for the August 2, 2018, crash, he was charged with drug-driving two months earlier and admitted the offence at a court hearing on October 10, 2018.

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Within nine days of that conviction, Thames Valley Police had received information which suggested the teenager, then aged 17, was driving a Renault Clio car registered to his mother, who was a Metropolitan Police Constable, around his home town of Ascot.

PCSO Gary Clarke had been briefed to keep an eye out for Coopey and had been shown a picture of him and told he could have been driving the Clio, a blue BMW 320 estate, or a black Fiat 124 Spider, a District Judge at Reading Youth Court heard.

The PCSO had been driving down Burleigh Road, Ascot which was adjacent to the private road where Coopey lived with his parents in a £1million home, on October 19, 2018, when he claimed to have seen the teenager sat in the driving seat of the Clio while stopped at a traffic calming measure.

Giving evidence at the appeal hearing at Reading Crown Court yesterday (June 18) former PCSO Clarke said: "As I passed the car, I looked straight through the driver's window where I saw it was Mr Coopey driving the vehicle. Initially he was facing me, but as I went past he sort of sank down into the seat to try to hide his appearance."

Coopey claimed Mr Clarke, who has since retired from the force, had been mistaken and it was his school friend Kieran Shepherd who had been driving, after taking out a one day insurance policy for £70.

At the previous trial in Reading Magistrates' Court last October, District Judge Davinder Lachhar had said she did not believe either Coopey or Mr Shepherd and accused them of "agreeing on a story."

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She had jailed Coopey for 12 weeks but just days into serving his sentence at HMP Bullingdon, he launched an appeal against his conviction and was freed on bail.

After enlisting the help of London-based solicitors Reynolds Dawson, Coopey returned to Reading Crown Court with his mother yesterday and successfully had his conviction and sentence quashed.

Judge Heather Norton, presiding over the appeal, had initially laughed at the appellant's case, after lawyer Eva Niculiu produced a "quasi-forensic reconstruction" video created by Coopey, his mother and his father, Met Sergeant Russel Coopey, where they recreated the drive-by sighting to try to prove PCSO Clarke could not have seen their son.

However, sitting with two magistrates, Judge Norton decided that Mr Clarke had only seen Coopey for three seconds, calling it a "brief glimpse" and said he had expected to see the teenager.

Judge Norton said: "It is recognition evidence from an officer who was primed to be looking for a teenage boy driving that car, who was primed if seeing a teenage boy driving that car to the assumption that [he] was Max Coopey. There is force in the submission that this is confirmation bias.

"It seems to us that for two 17-year-old boys to pay £70 to insure a car, it is unlikely they would have just thrown that £70 away and had Max Coopey drive the car in any event."

Jai Patel, prosecuting yesterday, had not probed where the car had been kept and the prosecutor's evidence of bad character relating to Coopey's two previous driving convictions, had been deemed insufficient to establish Coopey had a "propensity" to drive illegally.

Coopey was convicted of common assault when he was 12-years-old in December 2013. He then has a conviction for robbery in March 2015, when he was 13 years old at the time of the offence. He has a conviction for handling stolen goods when he was aged 14 and possession of cannabis when he was 15 years old.

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Before passing his driving test on June 19 2018, Coopey had driven his mother's Renault Clio while over twice the limit for cannabis, for which he received a youth rehabilitation order and was banned from the road on November 8, 2018.

After a police forensic collision investigator decided Coopey could not have avoided crashing into John Shackley, 61, and Jason Imi, 48, because he could only have seen them from 10 to 20 metres away, Coopey was charged with drug driving only in relation to the double-fatal crash.

He was given a penalty of 100 hours of unpaid work and a £105 fine, when a police accident reconstruction expert decided he was not to blame.

Coopey's parents had been referred to the IOPC after TVP accused them in October 2018 of allowing their son to smoke cannabis at or around their home, but they were cleared by a Met Professional Standards investigation, which concluded they had no case to answer.

After Coopey had that conviction struck from his record, his defending lawyer made a successful application for him to reimbursed for his travel costs.

This article previously stated that police chose not to prosecute in connection with the deaths of two men. This has since been clarified to reflect that the decision was evidence-based and was supported by the CPS who reviewed the case. 

We apologise for any confusion this may have caused.