Ashley family agreed damages in 2009. In a statement, Ashley's son said "The police killed my dad illegally. They have now admitted it and apologised, and at last I know everything that happened". While maintaining that the shooting itself was not unlawful, the police issued a statement describing Ashley's death as "a tragedy which should never have occurred" and conceded that it "was caused by a series of failures at levels of Sussex Police in relation to events prior to the raid and its planning and execution ... Sussex Police also acknowledges that there were serious shortcomings in the way in which the aftermath of Mr Ashley's death was handled". Impact Although the case merely confirmed existing law, rather than changing it or creating new law, it was still deemed significant for its confirmation that the standard for a claim of self-defence was higher in a civil case than a criminal one, and for Lord Scott's analysis of the differing purposes of criminal and civil law and the confirmation that a "not guilty" verdict in a criminal court did not preclude civil liability. According to Nick Davies, in an investigation for The Guardian newspaper in 2001, Ashley's death was one of 41 incidents in the preceding decade in which police in England and Wales shot a person who turned out not to have a firearm. Of those shootings, at least 15 proved fatal. In 28 of the 41 cases, the person shot had a replica firearm or some other kind of weapon, and another six were accidental discharges, leaving seven (including Ashley) which Davies described as "disturbing". Davies concluded that "this might look like a ... a licence for police officers to kill. In reality, it indicates something very different but equally disturbing...: police use of firearms is inherently dangerous. The more police are armed, the more they will shoot the wrong people. And the law which surrounds this is inadequate and incapable of fixing the blame when things go wrong". Davies described Ashley's shooting as "merely the final shot in a volley of error unleashed by just about every rank in Sussex police". Ashley's death has been compared by the media and academics to several other mistaken shootings by police officers in Britain, in particular the 1983 shooting of Stephen Waldorf, the 1985 death of John Shorthouse, the 1999 death of Harry Stanley, and the 2005 death of Jean