Thursday, June 03, 2010 

A strange report and another travesty of justice.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission's report on the Metropolitan police's handling of their investigation into the murder of Rachel Nickell is a strange document (PDF). Strange in that it is both so short, running to just 28 sparse pages, with little real detail, and strange in that it decides that none of the officers involved should be named. Ostensibly the reason behind this, although it isn't explained, is presumably because all those involved have either retired from the service or since died.

Why though should this be the case, when the decisions that some of these individuals made had such terrible impacts on the lives, not just on those who may well have died needlessly when leads were failed to be followed up adequately, as the report suggests, but also on Colin Stagg, the man who was completely erroneously targeted and attempted to be fitted up with Nickell's murder? This has the effect of placing the blame on the Met in its entirety, something that the report itself attempts to contradict:

The investigation into Rachel's murder was led by a Detective Chief Inspector supported by a Detective Inspector, although a Detective Chief Superintendent had overall responsibility for the investigation. All three officers have since retired from the MPS. The decisions made and tactics deployed during the investigation are the responsibility of these three officers. Individual officers deployed in any capacity on the investigation team were doing so under their direction.

So why not name them then? The Detective Chief Superintendent was John Bassett, the Chief Inspector was a man named Wickerson, while the Detective Inspector was Keith Pedder. You could make a case for not naming Bassett and Wickerson on the grounds they have since the case not courted publicity or attempted to make money from their role in the investigation, but Keith Pedder most certainly has, having written two books which are still in print, both of which are self-aggrandising accounts which didn't just defend the pursuit of Colin Stagg, but continued to accuse him of being guilty. It was also Bassett that brought in Paul Britton, the criminal profiler, supposedly the man on whom Cracker was modelled, who also escapes being named in the report, despite again profiting from the case through two books.

The report does however provide a couple of revelations. Firstly, that the investigation after Stagg's acquittal was reviewed by another (unnamed) Detective Chief Superintendent, who despite in the usual in-house review fashion of finding nothing amiss, also made recommendations concerning "MPS procedures with regard to the use of offender profiling and the training given to officers". He also recommended that the investigation into Nickell's death should be kept open, despite Paul Condon, the Metropolitan police commissioner saying after Stagg's acquittal that the police weren't looking for anyone else.

It also deals with the gap between 1995 and December 2007, the month in which Robert Napper was finally charged with Nickell's murder. The report puts this down mainly to the advances in working with DNA samples, although it admits that if the "standard" testing had been used then it could have been possible to have obtained a DNA profile at an earlier date. As it was, Stagg's complete innocence was all but established in 2004, when one of the samples from Nickell's body revealed the presence of two distinct profiles. When compared against a number of profiles, including both Stagg's and Napper's, the only match was the latter. It was still a further three years until it was decided the profile provided a prima facie case against Napper, having been repeatedly checked for contamination. The IPCC's conclusion is that because of the failure of the case against Stagg, there was a reluctance on the part of both the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service to take the case to court without substantial verification of the test results. It also mentions "subsequent criticism" after the acquittal of Stagg. Really? The only subsequent criticism was mainly from the tabloids towards the trial judge and the then rule of double jeopardy, such was the conviction that Stagg was guilty. Only Private Eye and some broadsheet journalists repeatedly argued that Stagg was innocent. The reality in fact seems that the Met was determined not to be embarrassed by the revelation that they had persecuted an entirely innocent man, and continued to do so through their all but intertwined relationship with the "popular" press. Only once the officers involved the first time round had long gone was a charge attempted.

The other major insight is that the advice from the Crown Prosecution Service and Treasury Counsel during the honeytrap operation directed against Stagg was that there still wasn't enough evidence to charge him. Despite this, the Met charged him anyway, with the CPS then apparently acquiescing and going along with it. If they really didn't believe the charge was justified at the time, then the CPS quickly changed its tune afterwards, as a leaked internal CPS report attacked the judge for having presumably exactly the same concerns as they initially had.

In the same way, the report sets out that while the police were willing to believe in the slightest of circumstantial evidence linking Stagg to Nickell, they completely ignored that which connected Napper. Both Paul Foot and the front page of the Daily Mail no less asked at the time of Napper's guilty plea to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility for the murders of Samantha and Jazmine Bisset whether he could have also have killed Nickell, and the report sets out that a tool box found in his home had red paint which matched the flakes found in Nickell's son Alex's hair, a shoe which had a similar sole to that of a print found at the scene of the murder, and also an A to Z map with markings on it directly adjacent to Wimbledon Common, showing the he was familiar with the area. When interviewed at the time Napper admitted that he had probably taken leave from work the week of Nickell's murder, but denied ever going to Wimbledon, and while a profile was drawn up involving Napper, the profiler was of the opinion that Napper was not the killer. The continuing belief that Stagg was guilty probably ensured that until the case was reviewed again in 2001 there was never a chance that Napper could have been charged sooner.

The report's ultimate conclusion is that the Metropolitan police has moved on to such an extent since 1992, alongside improvements involving DNA sampling that there is no need for any formal recommendations. Indeed,

[P]olicy, practice and technical ability have all improved vastly since Rachel Nickell’s death and I certainly do believe that things have changed beyond recognition.

Its only recommendation is that the Met should formally issue a public, unreserved apology to Andre Hanscombe and his son with Nickell, Alex, something which it today did. The Met did in fact also apologise to Nickell's friends and family as the same time as it did to Colin Stagg, and also did so privately, but has nonetheless repeatedly that today.

Whether the Met has been transformed to such an extent as the IPCC believes is only a partial comfort. Fact is, there are mistakes and then there are categorical refusals to explore alternatives; based on the profile provided by the legend that was Paul Britton, the Met was determined to convict Colin Stagg by any means, resorting to entrapment. When its methods were exposed and rejected by a judge, it didn't re-evaluate and reinvestigate; it instead briefed the ever pliable press that a murderer had got off on a technicality and let the trail go cold until it was reviewed by a new team in 2001. At the very least, those who were personally responsible for all those decisions should have been named in this report. That they weren't is a travesty of justice, another to add to the long line involving Nickell, Napper and Stagg.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

6/03/2010 10:46:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 

Barry George and the News International smear merchants.

Once you've been fitted up by the police (sorry, I remember, the case was "fit to be put before a jury"), being fitted up by the tabloids is probably something to be expected. In the case of Barry George though, the way in which three major outlets of Murdoch media attempted to cast doubt on his innocence was quite something. After having received a "six-figure sum" in damages today at the High Court from News Group Newspapers, along with the now customary confidentiality agreement (hopefully one which the Guardian will be able to breach like it did the one that Gordon Taylor signed after his massive pay-out over the Screws' phone-hacking), it's worth reflecting on just how they did it.

A classic of the genre is making someone comfortable, thinking they're going to be given a soft soap, friendly interview and a sympathetic piece, as you might expect having it just been confirmed that you were the victim of one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice of recent times, and then either going on the attack or, as in this case, making the quotes up. The News of the Screws, which bought George's story, today admitted that George had not told the paper that "he couldn't have murdered Jill Dando, as he was stalking someone else at the time". Unlike most made-up quotes in the tabloids, which you can spot a mile off, this was an actually believable one, especially when the tabloids had painted a picture of George as a notorious oddball that spent all his spare time following and frightening women. Along with the Screws interview, George also went under the forensic gaze of the ever fragrant Kay Burley on Sky News, which was probably the biggest mistake of the lot. Burley it seems decided that George, on the basis of possibly asking for her phone number and contact details after the interview (it's unclear how much of what was reported at the time was true, now that so much has been retracted) and cycling to the Sky News studios to ask for a copy of it was either stalking her or about to start, her fears of which, as well as being reported to the police, were also published in all the nation's leading titles. Whether they began in the Murdoch titles originally or not is now difficult to ascertain, but it wouldn't exactly be surprising.

Those attempts at casting aspersions on his innocence were however nothing compared to the treatment he got in the Sun the day after he was acquitted. Mike Sullivan, the paper's crime editor (featured previously here on a number of occasions) drew up a list of 10 "facts" which the jury didn't hear, a run-down which had quite obviously been provided by the police and which was in any case just as the flimsy as the case which was presented against him, as I detailed on the day. Also published that day, and still available on the Sun's website, was a "warning" from the woman George raped in 1982, of which these three paragraphs stand out:

"I was angry that despite what happened to me, Barry George had been left alone. No one had seen the signs or done anything about it.

"I have seen George portrayed as some kind of harmless eccentric. But he is far from benign.

"He knows how to work the system and look like a sad case. I think he always craved notoriety."


He knows how to work the system, a rather dubious claim about someone with a personality disorder and an IQ of 75, who in the words of Paddy Hill you wouldn't trust to go to Tesco - but not one that the Sun felt like tempering. Over a month later and the paper was still at it, making an issue of George sharing a hotel with mainly women, along with quotes which look highly suspect. Around the only piece that was even sympathetic towards George was a comment from the Scottish Sun columnist Martel Maxwell, and even that emphasised that George could still be a "nasty piece of work".

Whether George will be having the last laugh, having received between £50,000 and £100,000 from the Screws and Sky for the original interviews, and with now a likely further £100,000 for what was to all intents and purposes a smear campaign is unclear. It is however beyond low, and shows that the media has learned absolutely nothing from the way it went after Colin Stagg in similar circumstances, motivated then as now by the exact same police force which had brought the ridiculously dubious prosecution in the first place. George, you get the feeling, will also not be the last to be subject to similar treatment.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

12/16/2009 08:57:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 

How many more might there be?

The details in the case of Sean Hodgson are so familiar that they could almost be the boilerplate of any mediocre ITV drama: the local "oddball", often with mental health problems, who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, ends up convicted of murder and left to rot in prison, always denying his guilt, only for his innocence to be eventually established. It's also familiar because it has happened so often, with the names of those involved in similar miscarriages of justice becoming seared on the memory: Barry George, Colin Stagg, Stephen Downing, and probably most notoriously, Stefan Kiszko.

Kiszko's case, where he was eventually cleared of the murder of Lesley Molseed after he was found to be infertile, the real killer having ejaculated onto Molseed's underwear and skirt, was memorably described by one Conservative MP as the "worst miscarriage of justice of all time". That might be disputed by the friends and family of Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans to name but two, both executed for crimes they were subsequently cleared of, but it's one that's stuck. Hodgson's however must challenge it, as did Downing's, who also served 27 years before finally being freed.

For those of us who can barely imagine, or wish to imagine serving any length of time in prison, 27 years seems even more unfathomably abstract. To spend those years also knowing that you are innocent takes the equation even further into territory you have no desire to visit. Simply to survive that time and not come out at the end of it a broken person is almost always an impossible task, and sadly Hodgson, who was already a troubled man who lied pathologically, looks substantially older and frailer than his years. He will presumably receive substantial compensation, like the other recent victims of miscarriages of justice, but it will never even begin to atone for how he has undoubtedly suffered.

The forensic evidence which proved Hodgson's innocence is not always so conclusive however, and can rely just as much on the person running the tests and subsequently testifying as the evidence itself. In Barry George's case the speck of "firearms residue" which sealed his fate was found to have been as likely to come from any other source as it was from the gun which killed Jill Dando. Barri White was convicted of the murder of his girlfriend partially on the basis of particulates found on Rachel Manning's skirt, which the prosecution case said had come from his friend Keith Hyatt's van, supposedly used to dump Manning's body. This evidence was subsequently shown to be completely inaccurate; the particulates were not from the van's seat and in any case the scientist had not done the necessary work to even establish conclusively that they had. After a retrial White was cleared of any involvement in her death. Meanwhile Thames Valley police, having brought what was described as one of the most flimsy prosecutions for murder in years, has been forced to start from the beginning again.

One can only hope that the overturning of Hodgson's conviction leads to all similar cases being re-examined in line with the latest advances. Some others though still languish in prison on even less evidence, the most notorious example being Michael Stone, convicted of the equally infamous murders of Lin and Megan Russell on the basis of a supposed cell confession by an admitted liar. Some, perhaps rather optimistically, have since linked the Russell murders to Levi Bellfield, convicted last year of a series of attacks on young blonde women in London, who has also been linked to the unsolved murder of Amanda "Milly" Dowler. Stone has already had one retrial, and had a further subsequent appeal rejected, yet it seems doubtful that with the remarkable lack of actual evidence linking him to the murders, a "bootlace" found at the scene notwithstanding, that Stone's could yet turn out be a miscarriage of justice to rival all of the above.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

3/18/2009 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, December 19, 2008 

Still weird and still never wrong.

You won't be surprised to learn that despite the quite possibly unprecedented apology made to Colin Stagg by the Metropolitan police yesterday, not a single one of the newspapers which played just as significant a role in ensuring that he became a social pariah could find it within themselves to admit that they might have something to be sorry for also. After all, that sort of thing doesn't sell newspapers and it might make some of their readers question the integrity of both the journalists themselves and the paper they read as a whole. No, the story's moved on; now it's about the police incompetence, the paranoid schizophrenic with Asperger's syndrome who was able to kill again and the fact that he lives a so-called "cushy" existence in the highest security mental hospital in the country.

Stagg's tormentor in chief isn't quite finished with him yet though. The Daily Mail can't break out of a habit of a lifetime, so even as it grudgingly admits that he wasn't a killer, it just has to get in a few digs to the ribs:

£706,000, an apology from the Met and Colin Stagg is still bitter

Yes, how dare someone that's just "won the lottery" be "bitter"? After all, it was only 16 years of being suspected of one of the most notorious crimes in recent history despite being completely innocent; anyone else would be satisfied with their lot in life and glad that it wasn't longer.

He issued a statement of thanks for the ‘grovelling’ apology - and posed with a brand-new £27,000 Toyota Rav4 he bought himself as a ‘present’ with his compensation.

Ah yes, a 'present'. Only in the Daily Mail could something so innocuous be sneered at.

Inside were books on witchcraft, an altar and a black-painted wall decorated with chalk drawings of horned gods. Pictures from pornographic magazines adorned other walls. Books on the occult are still on the shelves, but a 50-inch plasma TV now dominates the living room and a new flameeffect fire adds a homely touch.

You really would think the Mail could lay off the snobbery for just one time, but no, apparently not.

Stockier now than when he was arrested, Stagg added: ‘I never want to talk about the case again as long as I live.’

He is not quite as media-shy as he claims, however. He wrote a book about his experiences, has given interviews for cash - and has just spent months with a BBC film crew. But his girlfriend - for whom he has bought a new patio, and lavished presents on her children - insisted to the Daily Mail yesterday: ‘Colin just wants to get on with his life like a normal Joe Public.’


What a hypocrite - how dare he make some more money when he's already won the lottery? He might not have kept his promise to stop talking to the media - but why shouldn't he when he's finally got what he wanted and when a high profile BBC documentary might also help put the record straight?

And still it goes on:

Miss Marchant confirmed that Stagg retained his interest in the occult, ‘but not in an evil way’ and said he was an extremely intelligent self-taught individual who ‘flies through the Times crossword’, but at heart is just ‘a normal regular guy’.

In other words, he's still weird, and we were completely justified in repeatedly suggesting he might just have been the sort of twisted psychopath that could carry out such a horrific crime. Oh, and he reads a rival newspaper.

The Mail's entire coverage is a catalogue of archetypal sensationalism, reflection completely absent from it, with the contempt for Stagg still apparent. The intro to this particular article is almost pornographic and wholly unnecessary, especially after Nickell's own family called for an end to the pain they suffer when the case is constantly recalled:

He probably watched her for a little while.

Almost certainly, he would have walked towards her at first, just to check her face. Maybe he even smiled.

This was the way Robert Napper stalked his prey before turning back to pounce on them from behind, usually with a knife at their throat.

Sometimes, in the dark, he would spy on them for hours in what they assumed was the privacy of their homes.

But here on Wimbledon Common, he selected his victim in the full glare of a summer day. Rachel Nickell was 23, blonde and beautiful, an ex-model and devoted young mother.


The whole cache of photographs of the young Napper the Mail has seems to have been handed to them by his father, whom the paper interviews. As a result, it's remarkably coy about his father's own apparent role in Napper's descent into mental illness, which the Guardian fills in:

During his first 10 years of life, he witnessed brutal violence meted out by his father, Brian, against his mother, Pauline. Such was the trauma suffered by Napper and his siblings that when the couple divorced, all four children were placed in foster care and underwent psychiatric treatment.

It seems Napper suffered more than his siblings, undergoing treatment for six years at the Maudsley hospital. As he reached puberty, he was psychologically damaged further when a family friend assaulted him on a camping holiday. He was 12 years old.


Another article summarising the police blunders opens thus:

The story of how one of Britain’s biggest murder inquiries descended into a disgraceful shambles which wrecked reputations starts on Wimbledon Common shortly after 10.30am on July 15, 1992, when Rachel Nickell’s body was found by a passer-by.

The Mail of course had no role in this disgraceful shambles which wrecked reputations. They just published what the public wanted, or even when their writers were sympathetic towards Stagg, they still had to write about how unpleasant he was, John Junor going beyond mealy-mouthed in writing that:

it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was indeed innocent.

Even in the Mail's main article, despite all the evidence now showing how Stagg was almost certainly completely fitted-up by a desperate police force that was under pressure from the likes of the Mail, it still uses weasel words and quotation marks, all to suggest that perhaps it was justified after all, such as here:

Their misguided ‘obsession’ with Stagg was compounded by what one senior legal figure described yesterday as the ‘mesmerising’ influence of Paul Britton, the controversial forensic psychologist who compiled a profile of Rachel’s likely killer.

Yes, it was misguided, but it obviously wasn't an obsession. If it was, surely the Mail's coverage down the years was as well. Perhaps it's just covering itself. Perhaps the Mail's journalists are just heartless bastards. Who knows? Still, obviously Rachel's parents deserve the same treatment given to Stagg:

Senior officers were forced to make an unprecedented public apology to Stagg, currently enjoying a £706,000 compensation payout.

Astonishingly, there was no such apology to Rachel’s family - even though detectives were compelled to admit that had Napper been apprehended back in 1989, Rachel need not have died.

"Currently enjoying"; says it all, doesn't it? There was in fact such an apology to Rachel's family, delivered at the same time as John Yates said sorry to Stagg, and in any event, at least publicly neither Rachel's parents nor her partner appear to blame the police to any great extent, her father in his statement saying in effect that the benefit of hindsight was a wonderful thing. Likewise, there was no apology from them to Stagg over how down the years they had urged a change in the law so that he could be tried again, although they have undoubtedly suffered just as much at the hands of the media as he has.

The Sun, thankfully, is much fairer in its treatment of Stagg, its article on him without any of the sneering of the Mail's. It even nicely skewers Keith Pedder, who always believed in Stagg's guilt sudden Damascene conversion to his innocence, without an extra word:

“I do feel sorry for him. He has paid a terrible price for a man found not guilty of murder.”

It would be nice to imagine that Pedder is genuinely sorry for what he inflicted on Stagg, but the money made from his books, now if not already heading straight for the pulping plant, probably means that he's in a decent enough position to be able to now feel contrition.

The Sun can't of course keep such fairness going; it simply isn't in its nature. Instead then yet more photographs of Nickell's son Alex are published, whilst the chutzpah of the Sun's story is almost sick inducing:

Reclusive Andre, 46, moved with Alex to a remote Mediterranean town to rebuild their lives — keeping their past a secret from locals.

But obviously not from the hacks which have plagued them both ever since Nickell's murder.

For sheer tastelessness, the Sun's main article on Napper's crimes wins the award. Headlined:

Ripper loved to butcher blonde mothers in front of their children

It attempts and completely fails, except in the exploitative sense, to compare Napper's crimes to Jack the Ripper's. Never mind that Jack's victims were prostitutes and Napper's weren't, and that the only thing that really connects them was the ferocity and savageness of their attacks, it takes the analogy to breaking point and beyond.

The Sun's overriding concern though is attempting to create outrage over Napper's so called "cushy" existence in Broadmoor, underlined by how he's allowed to feed the chickens and rabbits within view of a long lens. That he is criminally insane and such a danger that he will spend the rest of his life in mental hospital is obviously not enough of a punishment for his horrific crimes; after all, Philip Davies MP and Shy Keenan say so.

And the Sun's leader, naturally:

And the question The Sun asks today is this: Can it be right that a man who has so savagely taken the lives of others is allowed to live such a cosy life himself?

The Sun of course doesn't know whether his life is cosy or not; it just knows that he's allowed outside to feed farmyard animals. It doesn't matter that as well as a place for those convicted of crimes, Broadmoor also holds those convicted of none, who through therapy might eventually be released; Broadmoor ought to be the equivalent of Alcatraz, purely because of the nature of the crimes that some of those held there have committed.

Common decency demands that the way our justice system treats him reflects his crimes.

Should we let someone come in and rape him every so often, then? What is to be gained from locking someone so obviously damaged by his upbringing up all day and all night until he finally expires? Should his mental health be allowed to deteriorate even further, making him even more dangerous, as such treatment will almost certainly result in? The Sun doesn't say. Our rights just aren't being served by him seeing the light of day at all.

The Sun knows best, just as the tabloid media as a whole did. It knew then that Stagg was guilty and it knows now that it was the police blunders that doomed Nickell. It can never be wrong; it can never admit that it was just as mistaken, just as complicit as they were. And they accuse others of being totalitarian.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

12/19/2008 08:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, December 18, 2008 

Callous, mercenary and unfeeling scum.

At long last, Colin Stagg has finally received what he always wanted: an apology from the Metropolitan police for their twisted and cowardly pursuit of him. Convinced that he was the killer of Rachel Nickell, mainly because he fitted the psychological profile drawn up by Paul Britton, they took advantage of a vulnerable, lonely sexually inadequate man and attempted, through what Mr Justice Ognall described as "positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind" to get him to incriminate himself. Despite their complete failure to get him to do that, with Stagg in actuality denying repeatedly that he had killed Nickell to "Lizzie James", the Met's undercover officer, he was still charged with murder and held on remand for 13 months.

This is not just a story about a miscarriage of justice, of police incompetence and arrogance, although that is there in abundance, it's also a damning indictment of the vast majority of the press in this country. Through open collusion in some cases with the police, they too decided that Colin Stagg was Rachel Nickell's killer, despite the complete lack of evidence. Instead they focused on the fact Stagg was "weird", that he had a couple of books on the occult, that one of his rooms was painted black, that he had "paper knives". They salivated at how he had been found guilty of indecent exposure, despite the fact it had happened at a known part of Wimbledon Common where nudists sunbathed as the result of a misunderstanding, meaning they had an excuse to call him a "pervert", that catch-all term which instantly damns anyone in the tabloid press to instant penury. Most of all, they believed the police themselves, so certain were they of Stagg's guilt, the back-scratching which at the time went on as one journalist freely admitted, resulting in the sort of witch-hunt more associated these days with when social services fail to save the life of a child.

Right up until Robert Napper was charged with Nickell's murder, with him today pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, they hounded Stagg with a vehemence which ought to shock us, but which doesn't because we're so used to the denizens of the tabloid press demonising and smearing individuals even before they have been convicted of any crime. The Daily Mail was one of the biggest culprits, year after year featuring the familiar hatchet job articles about how Stagg had evaded justice through a technicality, on how he couldn't be tried again if new evidence emerged because of the double jeopardy rules, since changed by New Labour, featuring the demands of Nickell's grieving relatives, and then the serialisation of the open profiteering by Keith Pedder, the officer in charge of the original investigation, who wrote at least two books about how Stagg had got away with murder. The People republished the letters which Stagg exchanged with Lizzie James, sexually explicit as Stagg hoped to appeal to the officer who was the first to suggest pain and humiliation, upping the ante each time. As the BBC special Innocent: The Colin Stagg Story just made clear, James' claims got ever more ridiculous, including that she had been groomed by a Satanic-type group that eventually resulted in group sex and the sacrifice of a woman and child, but Stagg, desperate to lose his virginity, kept going along with it, a woman for the first time showing interest in him. That epitome of tabloid television, the Cook Report, was similarly determined that Stagg was guilty, ignoring a lie detector test that he took that showed he was telling the truth, instead demanding he take a "truth drug" as well. When he refused, it obviously proved that he was the murderer after all.

Let's not pretend though that Stagg was the only victim of the media frenzy which has continued to this day. What had started as the media helping to find the person responsible for a horrifically violent and shocking crime became instead a story that sells newspapers: the continuing tragedy of the beautiful murdered part-time model, further sentimentalised through the son that had clinged to her, even putting a piece of paper on her almost severed head, apparently as a makeshift plaster. Whereas in some cases the victim and the media join forces, in this instance it instead appears that the contact between Nickell's relatives and gutter press was always grudging. In a statement read to the court, Nickell's father Andrew gives some insight into what they went through:

The next loss is your anonymity. Your life is trampled on by the media. You are gawked at in supermarkets. You are avoided by so-called friends who think some bad luck will rub off on them.

...

You become ever more wary of strangers. You reveal nothing because they might be media or have contacts with the media. Copies of your phone bills are obtained and friends abroad ring up to try to discover where your grandson lives.

...

Every day Rachel's name is mentioned, her photograph published or her home videos shown, everything comes flooding back.

In a further statement outside the court, although also thanking the media for their continued interest, Andrew Nickell also requested that after today the media stop republishing her photograph or using the wearingly familiar home videos, one that seems unlikely to be granted.

As also alluded to in the court statement, Rachel's partner also became deeply disillusioned with the persistent media attention, taking their son and going to live in France partially as a result. Writing in 1996, he described the media in the following terms:

Callous, mercenary and unfeeling scum ... you've got people on your doorstep every day, people following you around in cars taking pictures of you, people peeping over fences and Rachel's face appearing in the paper every day with any tenuous link ... it's one of those stories that's become part of British culture."

Almost unbelievably, despite knowing full well that Andre Hanscombe left the country to try to get his son away from the consistent media attention, the Sun recently published a photograph of Alex obtained while he was walking his dog. His feelings and those of his relatives have always played second fiddle to the story itself, and the media's own profit from it.

How then has the media itself so far responded to today's events? Has it, like the Metropolitan police, got down on its knees and begged forgiveness from Colin Stagg for helping to ruin his life, making him unemployable, vilified, insulted, attacked, spat on? Of course not; doing that might hint towards their own fallibility, and besides, it might set a precedent. Only when ordered to by the courts or forced to by the Press Complaints Commission do the tabloids say they got it wrong. No, instead they've now got a new story: the Met's incompetence and their failure to catch Napper before he killed again. This is a story they've known about for years, and one which a truly investigative media might have pieced together themselves. Indeed, they almost did. The Daily Mail, chief amongst Stagg's tormentors, even splashed the day after Napper was convicted of the murders of Samantha Bissett and her daughter Jazmine with the headline "DID HE KILL RACHEL TOO?" Yes, as it turns out, but they instead turned their attention back to Stagg and their belief that he was the guilty party. It was left to Paul Foot in Private Eye, who always believed Stagg's innocence, to link more clearly Napper to Nickell. In fairness, both Pedder and Britton dismissed the similarities, Britton writing in his book "The Jigsaw Man" that it "was a completely different scenario", despite the extreme violence in each case and the child being present, even if Nickell's son was not killed as Bissett's daughter was. Britton, like the media, seems completely remorseless about how his profile destroyed Stagg and also resulted in the real killer escaping justice for almost two decades.

Amidst all the screams about the "SEVEN blunders that let Rachel Nickell madman kill and kill again", the real story here is of the media's abject failure both to hold the police to account themselves and also to investigate the other possibilities. By coincidence, two other miscarriages of justice were also resolved today. Suzanne Holdsworth, found guilty at her first trial of the murder of a two-year-old boy in her care, was cleared, partially as a result of an investigation by John Sweeney for Newsnight, the second miscarriage of justice he has been involved in resolving, while Barri White, convicted at his first trial of the murder of his girlfriend Rachel Manning, was also cleared of any involvement in her death. His case was featured on the BBC programme Rough Justice, as well as appearing in the back pages of Private Eye. In both of these cases it was the media so loathed by the gutter press that helped to prove their innocence. The really sad thing is that they might be the last of their kind: Rough Justice has been cancelled while Newsnight's resources are being continually slashed. The so-called popular media, the one which is supposed to give the people what they want, which in Paul Dacre's words will cease to exist if it cannot report on scandal, cannot or refuses to report on the real scandals. Wedded to churnalism and journalism which is cheap, fast and easy to produce, they claim to be the voice of the people while repeatedly failing them. If the tabloids and those who produce them have any conscience, they too tomorrow will apologise to Colin Stagg. Instead they'll already be on to the next nearest scapegoat.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

12/18/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, August 14, 2008 

No sense of shame.


I predicted yesterday that the same newspapers that stalked and smeared Colin Stagg for 14 years would not be at all happy with his £706,000 compensation award. Even I though didn't expect that both the Scum and the Mail would splash on it, each doing their very best to whip up faux-outrage in the way they have become so accustomed to doing. Not only did we get the £98,000 that was awarded to Nickell's son rolled out for comparison, but anyone and everyone who's received less of late has been brought up, or their families contacted for comment. Hence we have the Scum contacting the family of a woman murdered in the 7/7 attacks, who received only £11,000 in compensation, who declare that this makes the system a joke. The Sun being the Sun, "Our Boys" have to be brought into the equation, with the injured in action often receiving less than the maximum £285,000, although they also get a £20,000 annual pension. According to Phil Cooper, whose son received £57,000 after he lost the use of a leg and received severe injuries to his stomach, it's "a kick in the teeth." Danny Biddle, another 7/7 victim who lost both his legs, an eye and his spleen calls the system "disgraceful". The Mail even got the Tory MP Patrick Mercer to open his trap, commenting on both the "total imbalance" between the payout to Stagg and to Nickell's son, and then also onto our servicemen who are receiving nowhere near the same amount.

There is one comparison which neither of the tabloids make that other bloggers have however. Ben Collett, a promising Manchester United player, only a few days ago received a payout totalling £4.5 million in lost earnings after a high tackle broke his leg in two places and brought an end to his career. The one abiding message coming out of all of this is that the various compensation systems aren't fair or equal - hardly a newsflash. None of this is Stagg's fault. Indeed, that is the very reason why Stagg's payout deserved to be so high, if not higher. While everyone can sympathise with the victims of 7/7 who similarly were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's a little different to the case of soldiers, who know full well the risks when they join up. This by no means justifies either their lower payouts or their relatively low wages, but it's not comparing like with like. Stagg was picked out for his treatment by both the police and the media for no other reason than he was supposedly weird: meaning he was a loner, had a couple of books on the occult, some paper knives and an unusual decoration scheme. This was enough for the police to decide that he was a murderer. It was enough for the media to believe, or convince themselves enough to believe, that he was the murderer.

What directly lies behind today's phony apoplexy is that the newspapers themselves know that they're just as responsible for the payout as the Metropolitan police are. It's impossible to think that Lord Brennan wasn't in part influenced when deciding the amount by the media's continued obsession with either directly or indirectly accusing Stagg of being involved in Nickell's death. Their cover is to pretend that they themselves are wholly innocent of any wrong-doing, and so again claim to be on the people's side and for those others that have been compensated less well. Even now the Mail is continuing in just the same way as it has for the last 14 years: wilfully misquoting Stagg in the headline of its current article to give the impression that he is unfeeling towards fellow miscarriage of justice victim Barry George, when in he fact says he feels sorry for the time he spent in prison but less sympathy because of his past conviction for attempted rape and tendency to follow women. As Dave Osler also notes, it also gives the most perfunctory of explanations to what happened to Stagg: he was simply cleared of Nickell's murders, not wrongly accused or fitted up by the police, perish the thought.

The Sun kindly however provides a reminder of how it and the other tabloids covered Stagg's acquittal, putting up a scan of their front page the day after. NO GIRL IS SAFE, it shrieks, alongside a photograph of Stagg, with Rachel murderer will strike again underneath. The inference is all too clear: this man has got away with it, and he will kill again.

Perhaps realising that they can't go too over the top, the Scum's leader admits, probably for the first time in such language, how Stagg's life was ruined:

THERE is no doubt Colin Stagg’s life was ruined by Scotland Yard’s cynical fit-up.

He spent a year in jail on remand before the charges over Rachel Nickell’s murder were dropped.

He has since spent 15 years as a social pariah, unemployable, and with the stink of suspicion hanging over him despite his total innocence.


Could the stink of suspicion hanging over him in any way be attributable to the Sun? Obviously not, as even now neither it nor any of the other tabloids have offered apologies to Stagg for their low-level campaigns against him. Here comes the but that you were waiting for:

Even so, £706,000 is an enormous compensation payout.

Especially compared with the £90,000 given to Rachel’s son Alex, who saw his mum murdered and will spend a lifetime without her.

Or compared with the payouts to victims of terrorist atrocities.


How much does the Sun think an adequate award for spending 15 years as a social pariah is then? Considering the tidy sums which newspaper editors and their proprietors are paid and pay themselves, isn't £706,000 an about right sum for their own role in his misery?

Many will be asking today whether the enormous sums given out in miscarriage-of-justice cases should dwarf so spectacularly those for people left enduring a lifetime of physical and mental agony.

Does the Sun think that spending inordinate lengths of time in prison for a crime that they didn't commit doesn't often leave miscarriage of justice victims with a lifetime of mental, and in some cases physical agony, considering the treatment they receive inside? One judge notably described the process some have been subject to as "like a prolonged kidnapping". If anything, the majority of payments to the victims of miscarriages of justice are derisory and add to insult to injury when "room and board" payments are deducted from them, like in the case of the Hickeys.

The system is patently unfair.

As indeed is life, and the press in this country. The one bright spot is that so many in the comments on both the Mail and the Sun sites have defended the payout, often saying it isn't enough. The only thing that hasn't been stressed enough is the media's own role. To that, we should leave the last words to Emine Saner:

The compensation is only a part of making amends. Stagg deserves some very public apologies: from the police and others who were convinced Stagg was guilty. From defaming authors who have made money from him and from every person who has ever spat at him in the street or hurled abuse. And definitely from certain newspapers (it would be tempting to think the press had learned its lesson but the recent experience of Robert Murat shows that nothing has changed). Then, perhaps, at last Colin Stagg really can get on with his life.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

8/14/2008 08:29:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 

The Stagg hunt draws to a close.

It's difficult to think of someone more of a victim of the gutter press in this country than Colin Stagg. One other name does come to mind, but she used them as much as they used her. Here's a prediction: tomorrow the very same newspapers that stalked and hunted him for over a decade will be at the least less than happy with the £706,000 that Stagg through his solicitors has revealed he will receive in compensation for his treatment courtesy of the Metropolitan police. They will raise the amount which Rachel Nickell's son received, a derisory sum which could never even begin to account for how he was found, gripping his mother, covered in blood and begging her to get up. They will point out for a very long time indeed he was the only suspect; because the police themselves wanted him to remain the only suspect. Keith Pedder for one, the detective inspector in charge on the case, has written two self-affirming and congratulatory books on how Stagg had managed to get away with murder. It was only after a further investigation by a separate cold case team that another man, Robert Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic being held at Broadmoor indefinitely for two murders with similarities to the killing of Nickell that the police finally admitted to themselves that their hunt for Stagg had been futile.

Not that they have admitted publicly to that, or said the simplest words to Stagg personally that they got it wrong. Then again, why should they? After all, those other companions in the decade long stalking, baiting and smearing of Stagg, this country's finest tabloid newspapers, have never admitted they were wrong or said sorry either. Although almost of them were involved in pursuing him and ran articles calling either for the abolition of the laws on double jeopardy (which New Labour happily obliged in removing) or that implicated him in the murder if not directly accusing him, undoubtedly the most bile was delivered in the limp Sunday rag The People, which republished the letters which "Lizzie James", the Met's honeytrap exchanged with Stagg during the attempt to link him to the kind of bizarre sexual practices which the psychologist Paul Britton was convinced the perpetrator had. The Mail meanwhile, in the best practices which the newspaper retains for those that are accused of crimes, performed hatchet job after hatchet job, serialising Pedder's impotent book, and also ran an interview with Nickell's former boyfriend, who made a personal appeal for the double jeopardy law to be repealed. Their attitude towards Stagg could not be more summed up than by the words of John Junor, whom in an article purporting to ask the question whether Stagg would always be targeted as the killer who got away, wrote:

It would be terrible, however, to think that he is going to be hounded for the rest of his life for having been found not guilty of murder when it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was indeed innocent.

How magnanimous and kind of both Junor and the Mail to admit that it was possible that Stagg was indeed innocent, despite his acquittal. The irony and amazing chutzpah of the Mail asking whether Stagg would remain to be stalked when it was the one leading the stalking, while also attempting to soften its line but failing miserably is something to behold.

Nick Cohen, writing in the Observer a couple of years back, linked the credulity and continuing belief that Stagg was guilty among the tabloid hacks to the influence of the police on them, to the closeness which gives them their stories, their exclusives, and the photographs of the suspects themselves either being brought in or when arrested. This is undoubtedly part of the reason, but I am far more cynical than Cohen. These reporters knew full well that Stagg was innocent, as did their editors. The best that can be said is that they convinced themselves in order to appraise their consciences of any guilt. This had to be done because there was no evidence whatsoever linking Stagg to Nickell except the Met's attempts to entrapment, which he even then rebuffed. No, these stories were not out of any public interest to ensure that the killer was brought to justice, they were because they knew they were what the public wants to read, that they want someone to blame when such horrible crimes are committed, even if the case is apparently unsolvable, and that most of all, they sold. Nickell's former boyfriend, already mentioned, noted this. His bitterness at being chased out of the country, forced to live in France to escape was more than palpable in his description of the hacks:

"Callous, mercenary and unfeeling scum ... you've got people on your doorstep every day, people following you around in cars taking pictures of you, people peeping over fences and Rachel's face appearing in the paper every day with any tenuous link ... it's one of those stories that's become part of British culture."

Quite so. Much is the same with any attractive woman or child that is tragically killed, murdered or abducted. Whether it be Nickell, Princess Diana, Sally Anne Bowman or Madeleine McCann, they stare out from the front pages, forever locked in their youthful beauty, demanding that something be done about their disappearance or deaths. They pretend that it's because they care, when in reality it's because of their own business models, the phoniness of providing a service while sucking the individual they've latched onto dry until they too can be dispensed with, when the trail finally dries up and everyone, except those being exploited, have moved on.

The police's insistence in having found the right person is the justification, not the reason why. We saw it again just a couple of weeks back with Barry George, where again hardly any journalists or anyone outside of the police really believed he was anywhere near capable of killing Jill Dando, let alone in the way in which she was assassinated. Yet they printed the police's self-serving, laughably weak attempts to still pretend that George was the murderer, even while they must surely have known it was not true. In Nickell's case, at least the police have now found a man who might well be her real murderer, while with Dando it seems incredibly unlikely that her killer will ever be brought to justice. The victims in both cases have been treated abominably, whether they be the relatives or those fitted up. And yet our supposed justice seeking media, which never lets up on the law and order agenda, defends and carries the squeals of innocence spoon-fed to them by their sources.

Stagg's award, despite its size, will never get him his life back. It seems doubtful, even now, that he'll find work, after being made unemployable because of his notoriety. There is however most certainly a case for the £706,000 not completely being stumped up by the taxpayer. No, the real damage was done not by the trial and the fit-up, but by the compliant media which demonised and destroyed day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year. It should be Associated Newspapers, the Mirror Group and News International that should be writing the cheques and stumping up at least half if not more of the money. The suffering they have caused and continue to cause to countless people through their complete lack of integrity and not knowing when enough is enough is such that it's time they were hit in the only place where it hurts: the pocket. Their power however protects them, and there is absolutely nothing it seems that we can do about it.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

8/13/2008 10:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, August 02, 2008 

Weekend links.

The Scum, despite the complete lack of evidence is continuing to keep up the pretence that Barry George is guilty of the Jill Dando murder: their crime editor Mike Sullivan, known for being incredibly close to the police, producing 10 supposed facts which weren't presented to the jury.

George's conviction for attempted rape was common knowledge, in the public domain and also completely irrelevant. The same goes for his supposed "raid" on Kensington Palace. Incredibly weak also is the supposed evidence for his obsession with celebrity blondes - he had some videos which had blonde celebrities on them, amazing! George was a hoarder, and had up to 800 newspapers in his home whem it was raided by police. Some just happened to have Diana in them, although it's true he was one of the first to lay flowers after her death. The neighbour's allegation that he was always talking about Jill and had a photo of him with her goes against all the other evidence from others that he had never mentioned her, and the police never found any such photograph, faked or otherwise. The estate agent link is so weak as to be completely worthless. The police successfully contaminated a piece of forensic evidence and then have the audacity to complain about it being ruled inadmissible. George was in the street on the day - but hours before Dando was murdered! Prison cell confessions should always be considered as highly dubious, especially considering George's mental state, and the "lookalike's scare" is just laughable.

Also worth comparing is the Scum article on a latest civil liberties human rights outrage from Iraq with the Guardian's rather more staid and detailed version.

Elsewhere:

Polly Toynbee loses her head completely over David Miliband. Mr Eugenides and Jamie respond.

Centre Right wonders whether the incoming Conservative government will save us from the scourge of anti-British left-wing multiculturalist novels and authors. donpaskini points and laughs.

The Orwell Prize will be posting extracts from Orwell's diaries starting from August the 9th, 70 years on exactly from when they were written.

Penny Red on being stared at and regarded as a sexual object. As someone who suffers from the tendency to gawp, and subjected two unfortunate young women to a daily performance of such pathetic inadequacy and doubtless made their lives far more uncomfortable than they should have been, to put it mildly, it's instructive to read exactly how it does feel. As the Manics (or Richey James Edwards at least) put it, beauty is such a terrible thing.

Labels: , , , ,

Share |

8/02/2008 10:16:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Justice at last for Barry George, but still none for Jill Dando.

Did anyone, except for the Metropolitan police, the lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service that authorised the original charge, 10 members of the original jury, and the judges that rejected his first appeal believe that Barry George was guilty of the murder of Jill Dando? Perhaps a better question now would be how many of those aforementioned organisations and individuals still believe that Barry George *is* guilty of the murder of Jill Dando.

For it certainly seems that the police and the CPS, despite everything, continue to be willing to defend their horlicks of a case, even after it has finally been proved to have been one of the most rotten and circumstantial to have come before a court in recent times. The only evidence that even slightly linked George to Dando were the single particle of "firearms residue discharge" found in one of his jacket pockets when his home was searched, evidence which was later ruled inadmissible because of the potential for contamination, and a single fibre found on Dando's raincoat, which the prosecution claimed came from a pair of C&A trousers found, again, when they searched George's flat.

George, like others before him, such as Colin Stagg and Stephen Kiszko, seems to have been picked up for little other reason than the fact that he was considered to be the local oddball. George certainly was weird: as a result of both his low IQ and a personality disorder, he went through a phase of passing obsessions, one of which during the early 80s was with guns and militaria. Later he became infatuated with Queen, and regularly claimed to be Freddie Mercury's cousin, going so far as to change his name by deed poll to Barry Bulsara. He also, as the court heard, followed local women and took photographs of them, on a number of occasions harassing them to such an extent that they either became frightened or agitated. During the 80s he was imprisoned for attempted rape, a crime he pleaded guilty to, and a neighbour also claimed that he had assaulted her.

None of this however even begins to make the case that he was a murderer, let alone the murderer of Jill Dando. The murder weapon itself was never found, and apart from the infamous photograph depicting him in a gas mask with a starting pistol and the magazines, both from the 1980s, there was nothing to suggest that George had owned any weapons for years. What was clear was that the murder of Jill Dando was a carefully planned and executed assassination, of the type that suggests that it might well have been professional. The very last adjective you would use to describe George would be professional: tests on his memory, planning and carrying out tasks suggested that he was in the lowest 1% of the population. George also never hid his obsessions; he talked about them incessantly, to anyone who would listen. Not only did he never speak of Jill Dando, but if he had killed her, for him to both successfully get away with it for nearly a year and also not mention it to anyone would have been extraordinary. Memorably, Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six, said that you wouldn't trust George to go to Tesco, let alone to carry out such a meticulous murder.

After 8 years, George has finally been proven to be completely innocent. Prison is bad enough when you're guilty and able-bodied; for George it would not be an exaggeration to describe it as his own personal hell. Like other victims of miscarriages of justice, what they don't want so much as compensation is an apology from those who first investigated them, who rubber-stamped the prosecution, and who, in George's case, have continued to defend the case even after they have been found to be not guilty. To do so however would be to admit that the police, completely stuck, did the clichéd thing and either decided to deliberately fit up the local nutter, or saw what they wanted to see in the flimsy forensic evidence which they collected. Some sections of the media have spent a lot of time of late decrying the Portuguese police for their bungled investigation into Madeleine McCann's disappearance, criticism which although valid in some places has also bordered on the xenophobic. Like in Praia da Luz, the trail of the real guilty party has long gone cold. You can rest assured that tomorrow London's finest will not be receiving the same levels of opprobrium that their investigation surely deserves.

Labels: , ,

Share |

8/02/2008 12:16:00 AM | | | links to this post

Thursday, February 14, 2008 

A victory for freedom of thought?

The decision by the court of appeal to clear Mohammed Irfan Raja and four others of their convictions under section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000 is a complex one, but also one which underlines the difficulty of knowing when to intervene when there appears to be a potential crime about to be committed, of drawing up legalisation which has a potentially chilling effect on the free distribution of literature, extremist or otherwise, and also of relying on information exchanged on chat rooms, and especially of building criminal prosecutions around that supposed evidence.

The lawyers for the men have tried to claim that they were imprisoned for what was more or less a thought crime. There's a certain amount of truth in that argument, but there's quite reasonable doubt about what the men's intentions were, with the prosecution in the original case alleging, not only that the men were planning to travel to Pakistan to "train for terrorist purposes", but also that they were afterwards going to join the fighting in Afghanistan. This is what the first two parts of section 57 say:

(1) A person commits an offence if he possesses an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that his possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism.

(2) It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that his possession of the article was not for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism.


The position of the defendants was always that they had the material in question, with some of them claiming that it was for their studies, others simply for educational purposes, but certainly not to be used to prepare or instigate terrorism with. For the most part what they had appears to be the usual jihadist material, alongside nasheeds (Islamic acapellas, in this case the kind that usually soundtrack jihadist releases with praise for the mujahideen). According to reports from the Times and Telegraph, they also had

The material included a US military guide to terrorism that gave instructions on how to make explosive devices and a suicide-bombing manual.
Also found were extracts from an al-Qa'eda training manual, including a list of the most popular types of explosive and diagrams of triggering devices. Other documents discovered included a "military guide to terrorism in the 21st century".

The latter report is misleading in that it doesn't make clear that the military guide is a US army training document, freely available online from a number of places. As I've commented in the past, much of these so-called al-Qaida training manuals are nonsense, more likely to kill the person attempting to do anything described in them than anybody else. If they were only lists of explosives and diagrams of triggering devices, they hardly had even the building blocks of how to make any sort of bomb.

The BBC has helpfully mirrored the ruling (PDF) in full. This part, where the judges considered the evidence presented during the initial trial from conversations held on MSN, is especially illuminating:

37. Was there evidence before the jury that left it open to them to conclude that the appellants possessed the drives and discs for the purpose of instigating acts of terrorism? Without considering in detail the extremist literature and the evidence given in relation to it and the MSN communications we are unable to answer this question with certainty. Mr Edis took us through those communications at some length. While they lent support to the prosecution case that the appellants had formed a plan to go to Pakistan to train and then to Afghanistan to fight, there was nothing that evidenced expressly the use, or intention to use, the extremist literature to incite each other to do this. We think it doubtful whether there was a case of infringement of section 57, as we have interpreted it, that could properly have been left to the jury.

The judges' conclusion was that they only lent support towards the prosecution case, not that it proved it beyond reasonable doubt, which is the measure by which juries are asked to convict. It's impossible to reach a full conclusion without knowing exactly what the communications on MSN were, and as they was only really reporting of the case once it had concluded and the verdict reached, we simply don't know. This is what is alluded to nearer the beginning of the judges' ruling:

8. Subsequent police enquiries led them to arrest and search the other appellants, which revealed that they too were in possession of radical Islamic material and other material such as a USA military manual downloaded from the internet. Further MSN communications were found. These included an MSN discussion between all four of the Bradford appellants and a cousin of Malik, Imran, who lived in Pakistan, on 1 March 2006. It was the prosecution case that Imran was a foreign based terrorist. In the course of that discussion Butt asked about how to travel without raising suspicion.

Going by this, the evidence hardly looks overwhelming. There are plenty of reasons why you want to travel without raising suspicion, and not all of them point towards doing so because you intend to attend a terrorist training camp. That this Imran is a relative of Malik also doesn't help; if it was someone they had only met over the internet then it might be different. Much of the rest of the evidence against them is hearsay; that they had tried to take over a meeting of Bradford University's Islamic society and that one of them had scrawled "jihad" on chalk in a wall.

The other main piece of evidence, despite how some of the media have tried to portray it, is also far from conclusive: the youngest member of the group convicted, Irfan Raja, had left a letter for his parents (see image at top) after he had apparently ran away to join the four men in Bradford, especially when you consider that he was said to be depressed and upset at the time. There are no references to jihad or going to fight, let alone to Pakistan or Afghanistan, instead telling his parents he will meet them "in paradise, god willing", that they shouldn't be sad, although he also says he knows they will be upset, but also not to blame anyone, instead to pray to Allah. He also says that "just in case you think I am going to something in this country, you can rest easy that I am not." You can read into it what you like, but on the surface it's nothing more than an immature young person deciding to run away and presumably leave the country, then having second thoughts. Whether he intended for those who he ran away to getting caught up in this mess after his parents contacted the police, whether he had got the wrong end of the stick somewhere along the line or otherwise, he doesn't seem to have deserved to have been sentenced to two years' detention at the end of making such a mistake.

Paragraph 45 of the ruling deals with why the judges felt that the jury should not have been allowed to rule on whether there was a breach of section 57 in the first place, concluding that the prosecution had not made the case for the appealants' using the material to incite each other to travel to Afghanistan to fight, rather than simply to travel to Pakistan to train, while paragraph 47 asks a very good question: why they hadn't been charged under section 59 of the act, which deals with inciting terrorism overseas. The respondent first agreed, then reflected with this statement:

“The prosecution position is that there are a few utterances on the MSN which were arguably capable of falling within section 59 but they did not reflect the totality of the conduct of the defendants. Not every defendant had made such an utterance. These utterances also do not focus on the particular crimes mentioned in section 59 but are of a general nature. There is an inference that there must have been other such utterances on occasions in the past, and a further inference that there would be others in the future which would be more and more proximate to an act of terrorism as time passed if the plan succeeded. The prosecution case was that the material was possessed for future use in inciting and so instigating acts of terrorism. In these circumstances charges under section 57 were preferred. The prosecution considered that the totality of the conduct of the defendants could not have been caught within charges brought under section 59. Otherwise, such charges would have been brought.”

In other words, the prosecution felt it more likely that they would be found guilty under section 57 than they would under section 59, regardless of the fact that neither 57 or 59 really adequately cover what the MSN conversations suggested that the group intended to do.

The whole prosecution was then fraught with maybes, possibilities, inferences and suggestions. There isn't much doubt that all 5 of them had accessed extremist literature and propaganda, and were reasonably radical in their views, especially considering that they photoshopped their faces onto a poster of the 19 9/11 hijackers, and that their MSN names were nom de guerres of suicide bombers. The big question should be and should have been whether they really were going to go to Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan, or act on the material. That never seems to have been proved, and if the four were anything like Irfan Raja, they would have been prone to reconsidering exactly what it was they were doing, or even thinking of doing. The case in my view was rightly thrown out, although I'm not as certain as some that this is a blow for free speech or free thinking.

The other big question it raises, apart from how to tackle the ideology they were accessing, is when to intervene. Do we let those that want to go and fight in either Afghanistan or Iraq go and do so, knowing that eventually they might return here and put their training to horrific effect? Do we make certain that if we do, that we make damn sure they don't get back in? Or do we intervene early as in this case, under new, clearer legislation, and potentially imprison the innocent that were all mouth online and no trousers in reality? From my perspective, regularly downloading jihadist propaganda and releases so that I can comment more accurately on exactly what's going through the average jihadist's mind, what's happening in the jihadi online world and how we can more effectively fight back to win the battle of hearts and minds, and also chatting online where I have been known to make inchoate or sarcastic statements that I would never in reality follow through on, this kind of case slightly frightens me, as does the latter suggestion. As often seems to be the case, all the options on the table look like equally bad ones.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

2/14/2008 11:08:00 PM | | | links to this post

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates