Cat Knight: Working on Michaela Hall’s case has shattered my belief in a system meant to protect us

Content warning: domestic abuse, murder, femicide

As a lawyer, I fight for women’s voices to be heard. Women like Nina Cresswell, who forced the police to admit their failures when she reported a sexual assault. I’m passionate about driving change in a criminal justice system that is failing to protect women from male violence. But I’m also a woman. And working on these cases, and so many others like them, has shattered my belief in a system that’s supposed to protect us.

Take Michaela Hall. Michaela was a loving mother and a caring daughter. In May 2019, her partner assaulted her. He was on licence for a previous conviction, so was returned to prison. He was released in July 2020 and began attacking her again and again – the police recorded another 15 assaults, though there were probably many more – until he was returned to prison again in March 2021.

When he was released from prison two months later, the probation service graded him as a medium risk, despite his previous assaults on Michaela, and a long history of convictions, violence and domestic abuse. With probation services at full stretch in Cornwall, as they are up and down the country, that meant that they didn’t supervise him properly. That meant he could keep attacking Michaela without anyone paying attention.

Two weeks later, Michaela was dead. On the night she died, she called a friend in fear for her life. She dropped the phone and screamed, and her friend called the police. Two officers went around to Michaela’s house. They knocked on the door. Nobody answered. They went round to the back garden and tapped on a window. Nothing. And then they left.

As they drove away, one of the officers said she could imagine Michaela “lying there with him covering her mouth and stuff. But what can you do? She doesn’t help herself.”

They were following up on a report that Michaela was being strangled and screaming. They knew she was living with a man who was a serial domestic abuser . They knew they could break in if there was a chance her life was at risk. Maybe they could have saved her life. But they walked away. They walked away blaming Michaela for her own murder.

This can’t be another case that’s just swept under the carpet, so we’re helping her family take the police and the probation service to the High Court. Like all of us, Michaela had a right to be protected from inhuman and degrading treatment. She had a right to life.

It won’t change anything about that awful night. It won’t bring her back. But together we could change the landscape for victims of domestic violence and the protection the state provides. As a woman and a lawyer, I’m not settling for anything less.