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PUBLISHED: 14:48 GMT, 6 December 2013 | UPDATED: 19:51 GMT, 6 December 2013

PC Hannah Notley, 30, arrives at Southwark Crown Court today to be sentenced for failing to properly investigate rape allegations

Guilty: Hannah Notley, 30, told an alleged rape victim it was her fault CPS has dropped the case

A female police officer has been jailed for four months for falsely claiming that prosecutors had dropped a rape case.

Hannah Notley, 30, told the alleged victim, as well as her superiors, that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to pursue the case, when she had never passed the file to them in the first place.

Notley, formerly of the Essex Police, even told the victim it was her fault the case had been dropped, because she had reported the alleged rape too late.

Notley ‘looked the victim in the eye’, hugged her, and told her she was gutted that the investigation had been shelved, Southwark Crown Court heard today.

The alleged victim became so distressed at the news she tried to take her own life, prosecution said.

Sentencing her to four months behind bars, Judge Alistair McCreath said:

‘You caused her [the victim] needless and great distress when you lied to her.

‘But it was not just the fact of the lie, it was the manner in which you delivered it, because you looked her in the eye and you told her things that were untrue and you knew were untrue and that was a very cruel thing to do.

‘By doing it, you have damaged her and by doing it you have taken from her the trust she had in the police force and in the authorities in general.’

PC Notley broke down in tears as she was sentenced after previously pleading guilty to a charge of misconduct in public office, saying ‘I love you’ to family members in the public gallery as she was led away.

Prosecutor Zoe Martin told the court that after Notley, a sexual offences-trained officer at Essex Police CID, was assigned to the case of alleged rape in July 2011, the alleged perpetrator was arrested and interviewed, and his mobile phone and computer examined.

But when Notley was later asked what had happened in the case, she told a superior the CPS had decided not to pursue it.

She failed to correct the assumption of her superiors at Essex Police that the case had been investigated and passed on to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the court heard

When it was then logged on the police system as having ‘no further action’, Notley failed to put superiors straight and even told the alleged victim herself that CPS lawyers had decided to drop the case, despite knowing it had never been passed to them.

Prosecutor Miss Martin said: ‘She falsely informed her superiors and the victim of the case that the CPS had advised that no further action be taken against the suspect when in fact no file had been sent to the CPS, no such advice had been received.’

The court heard Notley even gave superiors a name of a CPS lawyer who had taken the decision.

Miss Martin said: ‘In reality, Ms Notley had not submitted the file to the CPS and no lawyer had been allocated to the case, and clearly it follows that no decision had been made by the CPS.’

In February last year, Notley spoke to the complainant, telling her that the CPS had dropped the case because she had reported it too late so there was no physical evidence.

Guilty: Hannah Notley pictured at an earlier hearing

‘She [the complainant] was clearly upset because it implied that the “no further action” decision to some extent was her fault for reporting the rape late in the day,’ Miss Martin said.

The matter only came to light after an independent adviser allocated to the complainant pursued the matter and it transpired that the CPS had never been sent the file.

Notley originally told the adviser that she would ‘chase’ prosecutors, contacted her professional standards department and made a full confession in April last year.

The rape allegation was re-investigated, the court heard, and the alleged perpetrator has now been charged. He is due to stand trial in May.

The court heard the woman had been left devastated by the revelation that Notley lied and it had ruined her trust in the police.

‘She said she thought she could trust Ms Notley. To find out that she couldn’t and she was wrong about that, she said it’s put her through days of hell, in particular thinking that the alleged perpetrator had just walked away from what he had done.

‘She says that because of Ms Notley’s actions, the man she states raped her is currently walking round the streets.’

Notley fought back tears as she entered the dock at Inner London Crown Court before pleading guilty to one count of misconduct in public office

The court heard Notley had been suffering from difficulties in her personal life - she had split from her fiance just weeks before their wedding, and she had later suffered a miscarriage which coincided with her sister falling pregnant.

Judge Alistair McCreath said he sympathised with Notley, and recognised that her life was in a ‘bad place’, and said she had not made any personal gain from her crime and had lost her job.

But, he said: ‘High duties are placed on police officers and a high degree of trust is reposed in police officers to perform their duties properly. The public expect that and the public are entitled to expect it.

‘By your actions, and more importantly your failures, in this case, you let down the police force of which you were a member.

‘You let down the wider public, but in particular you let down the complainant in the case yet to be tried.

In mitigation, Allan Compton, said Notley had been ‘beset with guilt’ over her lie and had not gained from it, but instead lost her job.

He told the court she had been deeply depressed at the time and had suffered some form of emotional breakdown, but it was never her intention to ‘bury this investigation completely’.

An Essex Police spokesman said today: ‘Essex Police acknowledges the sentence received by former Pc Hannah Notley at court today, which follows her guilty plea in November to a charge of misconduct in a public office.

‘We await the full detailed report of the IPCC investigation and will deal with any recommendations which are made.

‘The force takes the investigation of sexual offences extremely seriously and fully appreciates the courage it takes for victims to contact police.

‘Essex Police established dedicated sexual offence investigation teams in March 2013 which deal with such serious sexual crime investigations.’

Source

'Cruel' policewoman who HUGGED rape victim as she lied about the reason for her case being dropped is jailed