Life in crime | Reckless charges ruin lives

I was reading the judgment in John Terry's case recently and, for those who ?have only seen the media coverage, District Judge Riddle's 15-page judgment ?makes compelling reading. Of course the point that the chief magistrate was ?at pains to make, while meticulously explaining why John Terry was not guilty, was that the case had been properly brought. What, however, of the cases that never should have been?

Paul Chambers and Simon Walsh have, like John Terry, had more than their fair share of media coverage (thank you for reading one more article!), but there's one unifying feature that will frustrate defence lawyers in particular. We all see cases when someone on the prosecution side needs to make the decision to throw the file in the bin but nobody takes the responsibility.

In Simon Walsh's case, it has been reported that the police had originally been convinced that he was part of a child pornography ring. Approval had therefore been secured from a district assistant commissioner, the commissioner of the City of London police and the lord mayor of London, to raid his home. A dozen detectives thereafter attended his flat in two vans and even interviewed his goddaughters and asked if he had abused them.

They did not find what they were looking for but in pulling apart the most private areas of his life they found a tiny amount of material that fell within section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 and so, thank heavens, were able to prosecute him for something. The degree to which they were scraping the barrel was made plain by the baseless allegation of possession of an indecent image of a fourteen year old.

We see exactly the same pattern in Paul Chambers' case. At paragraph 11 of the Lord Chief Justice's judgment, the point is made that there was no evidence that anyone who saw his tweet about Robin Hood Airport found it to be menacing, or 'even minimally alarming'. Once it was discovered by the airport five days later, the manager regarded it as 'non-credible' but passed it to airport police in accordance with procedure. They also took no action, passing the buck to South Yorkshire Police.

Only when the case fell into their lap did we get the same show that Simon Walsh was to experience, only for Paul Chambers it wasn't police vans at his home address but arrest at his place of work. The airport management and airport police can be forgiven for following procedure but South Yorkshire Police and the CPS should not act so blindly.

In both of these cases a point was reached in the investigation where it should have been plain to see that it was time to stop. Not everything needs to be pursued to a conclusion and these men's lives were torn apart because nobody had the courage to say 'enough, this isn't what we're here for'.

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