A woman who shouted and waved at a cyclist causing her to fall into the path of an oncoming car, has had her manslaughter conviction overturned.
Auriol Grey, 49, was caught on CCTV shouting and waving her arm aggressively at Celia Ward, 77, as she approached on her bicycle in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, in October 2020.
Moments later Ms Ward veered off the kerb and fell into the path of an oncoming car and was declared dead at the scene.
Grey, who has cerebral palsy, was jailed for three years at Peterborough Crown Court after a jury found her guilty of manslaughter.
But her conviction has been overturned at the Court of Appeal.
Three judges at the Court of Appeal in London overturned her conviction.
Dame Victoria Sharp, sitting with Mrs Justice Yip and Mrs Justice Farbey, said: ‘In our judgment, the prosecution case was insufficient event to be left to the jury.’
She continued: ‘In all the circumstances, we have no hesitation in concluding that the appellant’s conviction for manslaughter is unsafe.’
Mrs Ward’s widower, retired RAF pilot David Ward, said in a statement read during the trial last year by prosecutor Simon Spence KC that the ‘clip of Celia’s last moments will haunt me forever’.
‘Rarely a day goes by without thinking of her and our happy life together, but I can so easily burst into tears, as I have on so many occasions,’ he said.
The driver of the car which collided with Mrs Ward, Carla Money, who was with her two-year-old daughter at the time, said that her life was ‘turned upside down’ by what happened.
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