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May

Caveats

Written by Satish Sekar

Dangers
Despite the obvious dangers inherent in such testimony, Michael Stone has twice been convicted of awful crimes due to the testimony of prison informers. At his second trial in Nottingham in 2001 he was found guilty of the attempted murder of Josie Russell and the murders of her mother, Lin, and younger sister Megan. The verdict relied on the evidence and credibility of self-confessed perjurer Damien Daley.

The Court of Criminal Appeal, consisting of its then Vice-President, Lord Justice (Sir Christopher) Rose, and then Mr Justices (Sir Alan) Moses and (Sir Robert) Walker, had the opportunity to set justice back on track in January 2005. They declined to criticise Mr Justice (Sir David) Poole's decisions explicitly, or even implicitly, preferring to establish or reinforce caveats instead.

Caveats
“Some judges might have given a stronger warning than was given by the trial judge in this case,” said Rose. “But in saying that Daley's background 'is that of a crook and you should of course examine his evidence with great care,' he was plainly saying that the jury should examine the evidence with care, because of Daley's bad character. When that is coupled with the judge's careful and repeated rehearsal of the passages in cross-examination where Daley admitted lying when it suited him and defence counsel's submissions on the point, we consider this was an adequate direction.”

They moved on to the effect of the caveat, or rather lack of effect in their eyes. “The judge's addition of the words 'a bad background does not mean that a witness cannot be telling the truth any more than good background guarantees a witness is telling it' did not, in our judgment, so detract from the force of the point he had already made about character as to amount to a misdirection.” Perhaps, but the better practice would have been to leave that out entirely, or give a stronger warning, especially in the circumstances of this case, which stood or fell on Daley's credibility and that raises other issues.

Responsibilities
The evidence against Stone was incredibly weak. Rose acknowledged it. It required Damien Daley's cell confession in order to convict. Evidence used to convict in the first trial included other cell confessions. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must have known that Stone did not remotely resemble the description of the attacker given by Josie. Driving home from work Nicola Burchell had an incident with another driver. She identified Stone as that man, which put Stone in the relevant area.

He was allegedly familiar with that area of Kent from his childhood. So what. How many people remember nooks and crannies of their stomping grounds twenty years later? As with many other cases, where he disputed things, it was taken as lies that could corroborate the case against him. There was absolutely no proof that he was familiar with the area at the relevant time.

The corroborating evidence was weak as it did not identify Stone as the hammer-wielding thug, or prove that he knew the area. There was other circumstantial evidence, including an allegation that Stone had been wearing bloodstained clothing at the relevant time. There were also statements made by Stone that ought to have been covered by medical privilege that established a desire to kill, but what was this corroborating? Before the cell confessions were obtained, the CPS had an ongoing duty to review the evidence at its disposal. Was this sufficient to justify prosecution and if so, on what basis?

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