I find it hard to believe that something as self respecting as the British legal establishment has sought to charge the British taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds to explain that police and the cps have lied to the court about the admissibility of evidence and expect it to be treated as some little routine procedural trick.

My recollection is that something in excess of £900 was demanded and paid but that the presiding Magistrate realised this was the nature of the mistake that had been made about the space of a single breath too late to avoid making a fool of himself and the rest of the bench. I would also have said the WPS who was presumably behind the debacle of a dishonestly undertaken prosecution must have realised at some point that she had been mistaken in what she overheard in that I hadn't argued about being asked to leave, I had argued about the landlady's right to tell people what they were allowed to talk about, and thought I was being helpful in changing the subject away from the fact of someone having apparently been smoking dope in the pub's rear courtyard: among relevant facts is that the music had been rather too loud and anyone might have to be forgiven for not having heard the details of a verbal exchange. What might be amusing were it not for the fact of tens of thousands of pounds of public money having been squandered on lies originating from witnesses mostly sympathetic to the landlady and the cps, and my life having been ruined by the fact of a misbegotten and dishonest prosecution, is that she seemed to have mistaken me for some kind of reactionary weirdo complaining (such people do exist but I'm not sure that I am acquainted with any) about the fact of Cannabis smoking. Local Councillors told me to ignore the fact back in the early eighties, I always have and furthermore, have never heard of as much as a single prosecution for simple possession since the mid nineties.

The fact is that I was waiting for one of the CCRC staff to respond to the fact she had not been able to write a satisfactory waiver document which allows the CCRC to examine defence documents prepared by the law firm. I'm not sure if they had grasped that the reason I sacked reps of the law firm THB was nothing to do with any work they may have done on the case itself, and e.g. I have no reason to believe that there was anything wrong with the defence strategy they may or may not have prepared. I was desperate to get some help with seeking to take issue with the manner of my father's death at the hands of my paternal half-brother, his seizure of any money in the estate and could not abide Mr Conley's ignoring references to his promise in this respect. Last summer I was waiting to hear that the waiver document below which I'd had to prepare for the CCRC myself, was acceptable for purpose and had expected to be given some opportunity to summarise the relevancies prior to the case being formally considered by them: I had not for instance checked over relevant material I uploaded in 2012 since that time.

 

I had expected their formal concurrence that the conviction was faulty as a formality, that on the simple basis that anything I had said about anything other than the video evidence was inadmissable as evidence, which was agreed at the scene by all parties. If they're changing this statement then it's surely only reasonable that I withdraw any sort of comment at all since I was assured that it was not going to be admissible evidence.

 

This was the response I dashed off immediately and as it says so far I have found it too upsetting to continue though I am considering an approach to a legal aid charity some of which also have a distinct interest in legal reform: the matter has consumed thousands and thousands of hours during the last decade and more.

25 03 24

Since the CCRC rather jumped the gun in making a final review of this case without giving me a chance to sum up what was wrong with the prosecution right from the start, and being among other things preoccupied with disturbing neighbourhood crime incidents, I haven't even gotten back to them since I fired off a quick reply late last summer pointing out that there are at least three separate accounts of the fine and so called offences supposedly perpetrated by me on 12/08/11 two of which are documented above. I have also been approached by a Sussex University research group as well as considering an approach to one of various legal aid charities interested in law reform.

As a lot of the relevant material I published online has been the subject of crashes and hackattacks in more recent years it seems reasonable in the interests of simple understanding to try and summarise the relevant events.

In February 2010 I had moved several tons of goods relevantly including masses of papers and a car into the premises of a place near the town centre from about a half dozen addresses whence they had been scattered in the run up to my father's decease at the end of 2008: among other things it did prove naive to have imagined that its derelict condition was merely superficial. Arguments about responsibility for accidents and belated dysfunctional arrangements to renovate the property, rather complicated the fact of trying to deal with an assault prosecution that should never have been brought or considered in the public interest; as did a furious ongoing contretemps already existing with police, care home staff, and the St Elizabeth Hospice over the circumstances appertaining my father's death such as that it all too arguably qualified as a murder, whereby I was effectively robbed of significant four figure sum which should have enabled the careful construction of a meaningful late life career.

What was of the fact that I had sought a brief respite from these difficulties by going to visit a local pub the Spreadeagle on Fore St Ipswich where I had been a regular in the early nineties thinking of finding a few friendly faces and some solicitous conversation. Among other things what was unfortunately of the remark that it had been twenty years since I had been in the place, everyone there were strangers, the live music was unbelievably deafening and I do believe that this formed the basis of quite a few complaints in the locality that evening: among these might have included the town's then MP Ben Gummer who then had an office two doors away. I had a couple of beers and I think bought someone a half with my third as it was gradually dawning on me that time had wrought many changes, that the music was too loud to really talk to anyone anyway, and that it was gradually swimming into my head that the last time I had been there a young lady had been complaining about acquittals or an acquittal relating to a murder that had happened nearby which I believe was late in '92: she had claimed to have seen a certain character fleeing from a churchyard with blood on his shoes and took some pains over saying she felt quite shocked at the acquittal. It had been 2005 when someone I had considered a friend whom I had not see for many years confided to me that the other acquitee was his brother so I had eventually heard a fair bit about that trial one way and another. It had happened about halfway between the pub in question and the place where I was living in 1992 but it wasn't something I had sought to take an interest in; given the circumstances appertaining my later teenage years I had become heartily sick of civic affairs and civic propaganda.

I suppose it is quite to the point, that it may have been in a few various interests to suggest I may have made a plausible alternative suspect. I don't think it entirely unrelated to the fact that social services from the later nineties seem to have evaluated me as a problem person rather than a younger half-brother even after he had been sent to prison for beating and stealing from our father; it being the case that associated events and their poor judgement had ruined my personal affairs and household leaving my belongings variously stolen and scattered. What is in respect of facts appertaining the legal advice I am supposed to have had in respect of the fact the evening's events left me facing an assault charge, that it ought to be viewed as absurd that the fact should have been viewed in complete isolation from events leading up to my father's death, or the crippling problems I faced with regard to accommodation.

What happened was that having exchanged a few words with someone at the bar whom I'd bought a half I suddenly found myself staring at a man outside being frisked and arrested apparently for cannabis possession. He was literally about two feet away from me on the other side of a window so it was hardly likely that I, or anyone else for that matter, would have failed to make any comment at all about what had occurred. The place had in years gone by been a haunt of students and goths and every manager there had always had no end of trouble trying to enforce the ban on cannabis. I had made some comment I think to the effect that it might have been a waste of time in that the local authorities and the cops routinely ignore the ban and the bloke in question had actually left, and it wasn't until later that I realised that some minor sort of unpleasantness of some sort or other had actually been going on between the landlady and the person in question.

A few things then happened fairly quickly, it seems apt to repeat that the incredibly loud music had only just stopped and that it is no surprise that misunderstandings took place because as I say no-one could hear a damn thing. When the landlady did start shrieking on about people weren't "allowed to talk about drugs in her pub," I thought I had been sensibly polite in changing the subject from drugs to the fact of freedom of speech and had actually said that "you don't have to have anyone in your pub that you don't want for any reason but if you do you can't actually tell them what they are or are not allowed to talk about." She seemed to have failed to hear this and I had also entirely innocently failed to notice her saying "you get out," or anything such as I was about to have a final drink before leaving. She then came round from behind the bar and hysterically struck me in the chest at which I thought to comically remonstrate, partly as a protest against actually being assaulted and partly as a signal that we weren't hearing each other correctly if at all, and entirely accidentally brushing the top of her head ever so faintly in the process which I don't think she even herself noticed. At that point I did actually hear her say "get out" to which I replied, being by then rather fed up with being undeservingly abused for my attempt to preserve a little good humour, "by all means," swiftly turned, opened the door and got half way through before her partner and perhaps several friends of his who were rather late in taking appropriate notice of her ill humour, pounced on me, dragged me back in and held me down with his organ jammed up my backside for about a quarter of an hour whilst they again phoned police to come and arrest me, it being the case they had only just left a few minutes before.

I had as I say been hoping to see some familiar friendly faces that evening, and the fact I had not might have been part of the reason I was quick to reason that everyone then left in the pub by then were either employees, intimates, or friendly acquaintances of the landlady. The only thing of matter I had said to them as far as the assault charge is concerned, was that there was no need to talk about it, that the security camera video would have captured everything and that we should abide by that. This was agreed by everyone there and the first thing I said to the police who arrived and freed me from this humiliating ordeal, was that in assessing and adjudicating what had happened we had agreed to abide by the video evidence to which everyone concurred. One policeperson was left to secure the evidence and I had left him with the remark that "you make sure and get the evidence" which clearly meant that he really ought not to allow someone else to get it, rather than e.g. being some vague reminder that he was on duty and had a job to do: I was then driven to the Station and had thought I was going to be offered a cup of tea and a lift home.

I was thoroughly surprised to find that I was being fingerprinted and locked up. The individual who was a WPS at the time said in response to the fact I had then stated that if I had hit someone they would clearly be marked by the two rings I was wearing, said that the landlady did look as if she'd been hit. At no point did I see any evidence of anything of the sort and I said so then and there. On balance I think she had mistaken my comments about who gets to decide what people are or are not allowed to talk about, for some argument about not wanting to leave, which I had been perfectly happy to do at any time, and had tried to do at the very instant I realised I was being asked to. She may also have decided to start lying to make a conviction seem easier; as far as I know the police who interacted with the CPS did claim to have the video at some point. I don't believe that not for one minute I don't. Once the landlady had been given an opportunity to supervise its extraction from the computer or whatever recording machine the video was on, it was never going to appear, which was why I had insisted that it should be the only evidence, and therefore the only admissible testimony would be that which related to it.

Now I do of course understand only too well the landlady's distemper in respect of the fact that she was responsible for what happened on the premises, it being a fact that whilst police, councillors and many other responsible figures in a town long administered by the politically progressive may almost always ignore the fact, that cannabis use remains technically illegal and a licencee would be unlikely to enjoy such license if anyone should for some reason, seek to prove in a court of law that he or she had entertained any ignorance of its use in a public house. I have to put it that she has no-one to blame for her misunderstanding but herself and that her partner should have been more insightfully attentive of what was happening instead of assaulting someone who had tried to leave as soon as he realised it was being asked of him. In respect of the fact she did hysterically strike me in the left side of the chest, what is of the remark that I nearly died after being attacked with a knife in 1986 at an address a few hundred yards away from the pub and have scars in that region of my upper body.

The following morning I was introduced to a trainee duty solicitor whose name as I recall it was either Louise Maples or Louise Reader; as I recall it as she had separate names on different letters and cards. She advised me to recount the incident to the duty sergeant which I wasn't particularly happy about given what had been said about the fact everyone in the pub had agreed to "abide by the video evidence" when I was freed from their grasp by police: given this to be a fact I failed to understand what purpose there could be in interviewing me without it. I was also quite disconcerted by the fact that by the time I had been granted bail Ms Louise seemed to have rather downgraded the importance of abiding by the video evidence to it being merely important as evidence. Now I don't know if this was merely stupid, neglectful or misinterpreting of what had been said. The fact was that I didn't see her again as she failed to turn up when I was called to answer bail; even more surprising was that I found I was being charged despite all that had been said. She did subsequently send me out a number of letters but they had also only undermined any confidence I might have been willing to place in her or them as they seemed written in hardly better than pidgin English: I suppose in retrospect this might have been a symptom of some attempt to mislead police about their mistakes and mendacity.

What is of reiterating that at the time my only experience of lawyers was of having been abusively shouted down and told I didn't even qualify for a defence back in the winter of 84-5. I've never been offered any explanation as to what happened when someone emptied a flat of personal property and was under the impression I was being threatened with false testimony and summary imprisonment if I refused to plead guilty to some kind of burglary technicality. I have had the greatest difficulty in even thinking about trusting a lawyer since that time; I get the impression it takes a certain degree of obsequious moral imbecility to be one. People have been commenting in the media recently (including Alexei Navalny) that English lawyers are more likely to spend their time helping Russian oligarchs launder their lucre than engaging in defending the innocent from dirty cops who posture that they're doing society a favour when they bend and break the truth to make up conviction statistics that are supposed to re-assure the public.

I really had expected her to turn up: I had been rudely assaulted at quite some length by someone I'd be unlikely to recognise with his pants on; was then lied to about inflicting injuries; then locked up overnight; then subjected to a barrage of hostile questions it had already been agreed were irrelevant; then charged with having committed a crime for which there was no evidence I knew of and have no recollection of committing. All that she and her firm had done for me at that point was to apparently accept some diluted version of video evidence having been agreed to be the only admissible evidence. If she had been seeking to mislead police about the definitive importance of video evidence it seems a rather childish way of spending public money, she had only worsened my misgivings in this and one tends to suggest police should be facing serious consequences for such deceitful fabrication.

So I was quite shocked to have been charged and when I was first summoned to court to meet another solicitor from the law firm Taylor Haldane Barlex which as far as legal protocol is concerned I think is a more formal step toward a trial. His name was Richard Conley and it so turned out that he had for some reason asked me to attend at the wrong time of day and I had to return in the afternoon having been initially asked to attend in the morning. I don't know if this was another kind of routine police tactic meant to unsettle people when there is no real evidence of a crime and the issue tends to raise many critical questions about the criminal justice system, but when he apologetically said I would have to sign papers granting him public money I was careful to state that I would only do so if he agreed to look into the fact that police had ignored detailed written reports from me about the manner in which my father had died. It seemed reasonable enough in that it was very much the same subject that fabricating an assault charge in which there was apparently none of the agreed evidence, was part of a longer story in which real evidence and real reports had been scrupulously ignored: as I recall it this exchange was witnessed by at least one member of the court staff.

When it is obviously the fact that after so many years certain minor and irrelevant details don't stay in the mind so well but the essential point was as far as the CCRC is concerned that I didn't have legal advice or representation, had thought one the one occasion I did get to court that everyone knew it had been agreed that we would "abide by the video evidence," and I had thought that questioning witnesses was just a going through the motions prior to having the charge thrown out: of course this was what various misguided characters had been working overtime to persuade me to forget to formally state. If the issue is that the this needed to be formally stated in court and was not, then it certainly does constitute new evidence, in respect of what the courts have and have not considered, and therefore also, an incontrovertible argument for a further appeal and simple acquittal.

Mr Conley had asked me to attend another interview with another colleague of his whose name I forget, all he did was ask me a few questions about what had happened on the night in question and drew a few squiggly diagrams of who had been where: I didn't one might say find this very solicitous. I was furthermore irritated by his evasive reaction to the suggestion that police had already catastrophically ignored reports relating to my father's decease and had to say the least played a less than thoroughly insightful role in events leading up to it. Since it was not himself that had agreed to this I did not try to make an issue out of this with him personally. Offhand I'd say it was something like six months after the pub incident itself when I had a phone call from Mr Conley in which he steadfastly ignored the promise he had made to look into the manner of my father's decease. We were not having a conversation I could comprehend. He didn't say for example that the material on the website I had referred him to wasn't clear or anything like that, he just ignored it and continued talking about arrangements he was making for the case itself. I suppose many might find it odd that I felt prompted to sack him but I felt he was being wilfully unhelpful in a very distressing matter: neither he nor his two colleagues had for example ever said anything about whether or not they could secure an acquittal which I felt should have been a swiftly arranged formality rather than something they drooled over for months in an attempt to embellish their own reputations.

To try and put matters into perspective what is of the fact it was already the case that I had from 1985 put all other considerations of a career or a family aside to pursue the issue of how I was treated by a solicitor, when I felt it would have been much better from the general point of view for him to have at least taken a half hour or so to have carefully assessed what I had to say about my situation at the time, and much better from my own point of view for me to have spoken off the cuff about the fact that my having been perhaps technically guilty of burgling my home, was the result of it having been arranged for me very much against my will or inclination rather than consequential of some kind of unscrupulous motivation. I had tried to report these facts to police in the later eighties. Over several years years prior to 2002 I had been run ragged by attempting to care for a dying uncle, a cancerous father and a delinquent half-brother; I had then been made effectively homeless; everything I had struggled to piece together since school age was scattered, stolen or destroyed; my dog had been poisoned by someone who might not have been happy with conventional scripts about democracy and neighbourhood politics; by 2010 I was trying to deal with a huge quantity of belongings which I was left with once my father had actually died late in 2008; I got no help from relatives who took his money; the Hospice who had been caring for him couldn't even correctly date his decease; the place I had moved to proved to be more than superficially derelict; I was getting embroiled in arguments about accidents ensuing from a lack of maintenance; all this made the task of sorting my father's estate and coping with other legal issues a virtually impossible task.

It seemed suspicious and absurd that Mr Conley should be seeking to ignore this sort of context after specifically promising not to do so, and I really felt that it only ever needed to be said that no evidence other than non existent video evidence was admissible.

I was obviously quite lost by the plethora of documents that were then sent me by Taylor Haldane Barlex and the CPS after sacking Mr Conley some of which were in an unfathomable formal Latin; this would have been the case even had I nothing more than two dilapidated ten ft square rooms to work in which were already crammed full of documents and other belongings. I tried to make some sense of it and had asked all the police involved in the incident to attend court for the first trial and also sought to contact witnesses, but having injured myself and been involved in one or two neighbourhood incidents in days prior to it I didn't attend. I was convicted in absentia but things went even more awry as far as organising an Appeal was concerned. The CPS refused to acknowledge or answer much or most of what I put to them and I had no luck in approaching other law firms for advice and representation. At one point the CPS told me to go back to THB for documentation and ignored the remark that our relationship had broken down. At the Appeal one of the police the WPS did turn up and as I say I had thought the court was just going through the motions prior to throwing the conviction out. I had been, to use a more common form of speech 'done over' by several groups of people in various ways, was facing an impossible set of personal situations references to which were ignored by those solicitors who were supposedly helping me, and in the face of such hostile systematic deception, it didn't cross my mind that at the Appeal I would formally need to state that it had been agreed that the only admissible evidence would be a discussion of video evidence which was never produced though I believe that police had at some point lied about having it.

I did try to make an application to the CCRC in about 2014 but had trouble trying to work out what they were actually asking me for. Given the fact that problems with accommodation have been ongoing throughout the intervening time, that neighbourhood crime problems have only worsened and that matters relating to my father's decease remain unresolved, it is only relatively recently that I had made another attempt to seek a review with them. Having been quite lengthily interviewed by two of its employees who had travelled across two counties to get here I had thought my arguments for a further Appeal had been overwhelmingly accepted. They certainly didn't dispute my reasoning in saying that I don't know why I have been convicted and that it must have been something to do with a partial production of testimony that ought to have been ruled inadmissable.

So why have I been presented with a completely contrary and nonsensical conclusion before being given an opportunity to summarise and review what material I do have about the matter? I can appreciate that people are busy and the government doesn't want to spend money on public services but complaints about competence are widespread.