The Defence Brief

Serious questions for police following Liam Allen acquittal The Times front page carries a startling report today of a rape trial that ended in acquittal of the defendant, Liam Allan, on the second day of trial after the police revealed a cache of messages obtained by them from the complainant’s telephone that they had decided to withhold from both the prosecutor and the defence. It seems that in Mr Allan’s case the police had seized the complainant’s mobile telephone as evidence and interrogated it to obtain all messages contained therein. What happened next is unclear, the least damaging (to the police officers involved) theory is that they simply did not bother to read the messages. I’ll leave you to work out other possibilities. On day one of the trial, the complainant (who is still entitled to anonymity despite the prosecution being so sure that her allegations were entirely fabricated that they felt compelled to offer no evidence against the defendant) gave evidence ...

I seem to be constantly departing from my main aim of talking about motoring law on the rare occasions I manage to write a blog but today the Times today ran an appalling story(£££) that serves only to sensationalise the public’s perception of how rape and sexual assault trials are conducted and can do nothing but put victims in fear of going to the police following an attack. They also included reference to the Ched Evans proving that once accused you can never escape these allegations even after acquittal - here's what I had to say about Evans case at the time . According to the Times a study of 550 trials conducted over a two-year period found questions about a complainants sexual past were put in three-quarters of cases, which seems to suggest that the rules preventing this are being improperly circumvented. The Times goes on to assert that 44% of complainants were only told that they would face such questions after the trial had begun. Sadly, not a single one of t...

Ched Evans Before I begin, I will say that at around 4,500 words this is probably the longest blog I’ve ever posted but I think it’s all necessary to set the scene for this case and explain the background that has been largely ignored or airbrushed in the press. Despite its length, I have not attempted to include every little detail of either fact or law but have done my best to provide a balanced picture of the Ched Evans case, what happened and why the courts reached the decisions they did. There has been so much written about the Ched Evans case over the past weekend, much of it based on a very shaky grasp of the facts and law, that I decided I would read up about the case and weigh in (hopefully on a slightly firmer footing than most of the articles I’ve read so far). Broadly speaking there seem to be three groups who have opinions on the case: 1.        Sexual violence groups (including people describing themselves as “radical feminists”...

Acquittals don't necessarily mean the shadow of a rape allegation disappears The Court of Appeal, led by the Master of the Rolls, published its judgment in the case of Regina (R) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police & Another a few days ago. While the title of the case may have non-lawyers reaching for the back button to escape a boring legal discussion, I beg you to hold fire just a moment because this is one of those cases that just might impact on your life one day. In Greater Manchester Police (sorry I’m not typing the whole case name out every time – maybe I should call it Peter’s case, since that’s the name of the Chief in question… on second thoughts that’s probably too silly even for me), the court considered an appeal from the High Court against the dismissal of R’s claim for judicial review. The Greater Manchester Police case began when R was accused of rape – he was put on trial and acquitted. For the moment, we know no more about him o...

Reporting on the CJS is often ill-informed On the 17 th September 2015, the Daily Mail published a story entitled, “Judge rules it is right that child molester who abused ethnic minority girls got longer sentence because Asian sex crime victims suffer more than whites” .  Many people have commented on this story in the past few days including one barrister who said on Twitter , “HHJ Cahill and CA said Asian Children suffer more than white children of [sic] sexually abused.  Let that sink in for a second and then scream” Now, if any court said that it would be an outrage but neither HHJ Cahill in the Crown Court nor their Lordships in the Court of Appeal said anything of the sort.  Giving judgment of the Court of Appeal, Mr Justice Walker said, “The remaining point taken by Mr Shafi [advocate for the appellant] is that the judge had, he submitted, regarded the offending as aggravated because of the victims’ ethnic and religious origin. This point is, with...

Justice: weeding out the truth from the lies... well trying to at least When we think of false allegations the thing that comes to mind, for me at least, is rape.  Everything about sexual offences is controversial.  There are people who believe that false rape allegations are rife and their polar opposites who cannot accept that anybody would ever lie about such a thing.  For what it’s worth, I fall in the middle.  I know that some people lie about being the victim of sexual offences (and all sorts of other offences for that matter) and I also think that most complainants are honest.  When I say I know some people make false complaints I mean I have acted in two cases where I have no doubt at all that false allegations of sexual assaults were made – I’ve also acted in far more where I believed every word spoken by the victim(s).  But, today’s blog isn’t about sex (sorry if that disappoints you); today is about a false allegation of another typ...