Police
witness on perjury charge
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6200454.stm
BBC
- 1st December 2006
A computer
analyst who has given expert testimony in highly-sensitive court
cases has been charged with perjury.
Jim Bates
has served as a police witness in dozens of cases related to Scotland
Yard's inquiry into internet child pornography, Operation Ore.
The Crown
Prosecution Service told BBC News he was charged on Friday with
one count of perjury and two offences of making false statements.
He has been
bailed to appear before magistrates in Leicester on 7 December.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1678810_1,00.html
Child
porn suspects set to be cleared in evidence 'shambles' 3rd July
2005
DOZENS of men accused of downloading child pornography from the
internet may have been wrongly prosecuted, according to expert prosecution
and defence witnesses.
New evidence
suggests that Operation Ore, Britain’s biggest child pornography
investigation, may have prosecuted innocent men on the basis of
discredited American police testimony and questionable forensic
methods.
Jim Bates,
a computer expert who has served as a witness for the prosecution
or the defence in more than 100 child porn cases, says many Ore
cases are now likely to collapse or be overturned in the Court of
Appeal. “It has been a shambles from the word go,” he
said.
The nationwide
police investigation was launched three years ago after a list of
7,200 British suspects was supplied to British police by American
authorities.
The men
on the list stand accused of having used their credit cards to pay
for child porn through Landslide, a sex website that operated in
Texas from 1996-9.
The accusations
have led to 33 suicides, most recently that of Commodore David White,
the commander of British forces in Gibraltar. He was found dead
in his swimming pool on January 8.
Bates believes
records of credit card transactions on the site are unreliable and
therefore the names of alleged subscribers cannot be used as evidence.
Thomas Reedy,
the man who set up the website, was investigated by the FBI in the
1990s for credit card fraud. “I am convinced that a massive
fraud has been perpetrated at Landslide and an unknown number of
subscriptions are fake,” said Bates.
He cites
the case of Dr Paul Grout, a senior accident specialist at Hull
Royal Infirmary, who was falsely accused of accessing child porn.
Grout, who was praised for his help at the 2001 Selby rail crash,
lost his £70,000-a-year job because of the allegations. Many
of his friends “drifted off” and he and his wife Susie
endured huge strains on their marriage.
It was not
until his case came to Hull crown court in April last year that
the Yorkshire doctor was able to prove his innocence. His lawyers
showed that, while Grout had used his credit card to pay for a meal
in a restaurant in Yorkshire, someone else had been using it 5,000
miles away in Lake Tahoe, America.
In a case
that legal experts believe may prove a landmark judgment, Judge
David Bentley threw out the prosecution argument. In his judgment,
Bentley dismissed some police evidence as “utter nonsense”.
He said the way the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had held back
some information vital to Grout’s defence had “stunk
of unfairness”.
Another
computer user wrongly accused of downloading child pornography was
Robert Del Naja, frontman of the group Massive Attack. His arrest
in February 2003 was leaked to the media but the case against him
was dropped less than a month later.
One police
officer, Peter Johnston, became so disillusioned at what he described
as the Ore “witch-hunt” that he resigned from his job
with Merseyside police.
In a letter
to The Sunday Times, Johnston said: “I began to doubt the
validity of the evidence surrounding the circumstances of the initial
investigation in America . . . I found it difficult to rationalise
how offenders had been identified solely on a credit card number.”
Bates believes
that evidence, highlighted by Duncan Campbell, an investigative
journalist and an expert witness in some Ore cases, could lead to
many cases being dropped.
In an article in last week’s Sunday Times, Campbell revealed
that sworn statements provided in British courts by two American
detectives who initiated Operation Ore could no longer be relied
upon.
The two,
Dallas detective Steve Nelson and US postal inspector Michael Mead,
had claimed that everyone who went to Landslide always did so through
a front-page screen button saying “Click Here (for) Child
Porn”.
But Campbell
has established that the button was never on the website’s
front page. Instead it was on an advertisement for another website
buried deep in the Landslide website.
That discovery
has effectively removed a key plank of many of the Ore prosecutions
where no actual child porn was found.
Those prosecutions
were based on the assertion that evidence that someone had paid
to access Landslide automatically meant that they had paid to access
child porn.
Steve Barker,
a solicitor who acts for one Operation Ore suspect in a High Court
appeal, said that in many prosecutions police were unable to disprove
defendants had simply accessed legal adult porn rather than paedophile
material. In other cases, child porn might have been accessed accidentally
by those looking for adult porn.
The CPS
has also disclosed that an internal inquiry has raised serious questions
over the evidence provided by Brian Underhill, a key police witness
in some 600 Ore cases. The CPS said it would now disclose the doubts
raised by its inquiry to defence solicitors before future trials
began.
The CPS
last week defended its role in the hundreds of successful cases
in which defendants had pleaded guilty. A spokeswoman said: “Each
case was considered on its own merits and the evidence provided
by police has been subject to thorough scrutiny.”
