By James Mulholland

THE son of a legendary Scots lawyer has defended his decision to prosecute TV star Caroline Flack. 

Ed Beltrami, 52, said he had no other option but to prosecute the former Love Island host, who died in February.

The former head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s North London Division had ordered Ms Flack to be prosecuted for domestic abuse. 

Mr Beltrami acted after Miss Flack, 40, had been arrested for allegedly assaulting her boyfriend, 27-year-old Lewis Burton, in a case that garnered many media headlines. 

However, she took her own life on February 15, 2020 - a day after she learned that she was to be taken to court for allegedly striking Mr Burton with a lamp. 

Mr Beltrami told the Wales on Sunday website that his job meant taking tough decisions. 

He said that prosecutors were unable to “fold at the first sign of trouble” because domestic abuse tended to escalate and become habitual. 

He also said that he had never heard of Ms Flack before he charged her and that Mr Burton’s desire for her not to be prosecuted didn’t play any role in his decision. 

He added: “You’ve got to come to a decision as a prosecutor. You’ve got to do what you think is right.

“You cannot do what you think is popular.

“Supposing we had made a decision not to proceed, which we could have done, and she goes back to live with the boyfriend and she loses her temper again on another occasion, hits him a bit harder with a lamp or with something else, and he dies. How would that look then?”

Mr Beltrami, who has recently been appointed chief prosecutor for Wales, is the son of top Scots solicitor advocate Joe Beltrami. 

Mr Beltrami Snr died in 2015 aged 82 was regarded as being one of Scotland’s leading criminal lawyers.

It is said that the first thing that many Glaswegian gangsters did upon being arrested was to tell police: “Get me Beltrami”.

He represented Patrick Meehan who was convicted of murdering 72-year-old Rachel Ross in a botched robbery in Ayr in 1969. 

After the trial, William “Tank” McGuinness came to see Beltrami to tell him that he and another man had been the robbers, and not Meehan. In 1976 McGuinness died in Glasgow Royal Infirmary Hospital - he had been savagely beaten two weeks earlier. 

With permission from his family, Beltrami then handed McGuinness’s statements over to the police and Meehan was pardoned. 

In 1980 he acted for the wrestler Andy Robin, whose bear, Hercules who escaped in the Western Isles. 

Robin was charged with failing to keep a wild animal under control; an offence that could have resulted in the confiscation of the bear. The charge was dropped after Beltrami successfully argued that the bear was not wild but was a working animal. 

He also threatened prosecutors with demanding an identity parade involving five other bears if the case continued.

Ed Beltrami told Wales on Sunday that he left Scotland in order to escape the shadow of his father. Both of his brothers, Adrian and Jason, also went on to become lawyers.

Speaking about the Caroline Flack case, Mr Beltrami said he didn’t know of Caroline Flack. 

He added: “To be absolutely frank with you I had never actually heard of her. 

“It had come into the area and it had blown up in the press which is why it was referred to me.”

He also told the Wales on Sunday that it was important to prosecute domestic abuse cases. 

He also said that prosecutors can proceed with such cases regardless of the wishes of the alleged victims. 

He added: “The fact that the victim doesn’t want to know. You’ve got to look at whether you can prosecute without the support of the victim. Domestic abuse is a separate category by itself – high risk, high risk of repetition, high risk of the offending escalating – so you have to look at that.

“The facts of this case were the guy had made his complaint, he had phoned the police, he was terrified he was going to be killed, he’s been hit over the head with a weapon, namely a lamp, he’s got a cut to his head, and she’s made an admission to the police at the scene.”

“So in the general principles of domestic abuse you say: ‘Well I’m going to proceed without the victim because I’ve got the admission, I’ve got the complaint from the victim which I’ll try to get in, I’ve got the physical evidence of the cut to the head and the mess in the flat which has been filmed by the police’.

“But obviously when you make that decision to proceed with case you have absolutely no idea that the defendant is going to take her own life. You can’t possibly anticipate that sort of thing.”

In the aftermath of Miss Flack’s death, a petition signed by more than 850,000 people was handed to the government, calling for the introduction of a “Caroline’s Law” in her honour, to bring an end to “harassment and bullying by the media”.