Friday 29 May 2009

“I Am (Above) The Law!”

Says the UK’s answer to Judge Dredd:
A chief constable who is refusing to return computers suspected of holding masses of child abuse images to a controversial expert witness could face jail and the sack.

Colin Port, head of Avon and Somerset police, is accused of defying a High Court order.

He was served with a summons alleging contempt of court at his force headquarters earlier this week.

But he is adamant he will not give back 87 hard drives and 2,500 photographs of abuse seized from the home of Jim Bates, a forensic computer analyst.
Hmmm, this seems a pretty dangerous course of action for a chief constable to take. More detail of the legal wrangling and possible consequences of it can be found here at Bystander’s blog.

But what could prompt such a trenchant refusal to obey the court order?

Ah:
Bates, who is seen by many as one of the founders of forensic computer analysis, fears he is being targeted by police because he has become an outspoken critic of Operation Ore, a police investigation that began in the late 1990s and led to thousands of arrests.
And a great deal of controversy. So much so, that Mr Bates is now a campaigner for those caught in the ‘Ore’ web.

And it seems Port isn’t the only law enforcement officer with a flexible approach to those pesky laws:
Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, said: 'We fully support the chief constable in this matter.

'In our view it could be argued that the chief constable would be committing an offence by giving abuse images back to this individual, unless he held them as part of an ongoing case.'
Yup, he’d be committing an offence by complying with a lawful court order.

We’re through the looking glass, people!

Update: Bea Campbell has now weighed in on this. Hilarity ensues in the comments...

4 comments:

Dr Melvin T Gray said...

An entire justice system faces ridicule, if not implosion, when police defy the High Court.
Whatever next, a joint police and quango coup d'état?

JuliaM said...

"An entire justice system faces ridicule, if not implosion, when police defy the High Court."

I'm surprised it isn't getting more attention from the MSM, but then, it's expenses-a-go-go at the moment...

woman on a raft said...

Long story short - this is another one in the same bag as David Southall, Gene Morrison and Derek Draper. Expert who isn't get found out.

Essentially, at the start of Operation Ore, the US slammed down on Landslide Productions. Yes, they supplied some scummy stuff, but, crucially, they also supplied a load of stuff which was just adult.

In the UK, the police argued that if your credit card number was with Landslide, you had bought prohibited images. A crucial lie was told: that Landslide was exclusively concerned with minors and that it's front page was a direct link to that.

Somebody - and it is quite possibly Bates - doctored the front page screens shown to the courts, which emerged when the BBC used some differing shots from its own archive.

The person most concerned with assuring the courts that the images on peoples' computers were obscene was Jim Bates, who formed a company with a genuine computer expert (who has left now and was last seen writing skin-analysis algorithyms to try to make disc searches faster) and a police officer who, crucially, was the one signing-up the expert witness work through his old mates and offering "conviction guaranteed".

Then it turned out that Bates was not qualified as he claimed.

The police were furious. Why they prosecuted, goodness knows. It will only serve to eventually demonstrate that they didn't bother to check his qualifications and colluded with fabricating evidence.

Had they just refused to deal further with him, it would have been much harder for Ore appeals to have gone ahead. Pradoxically, having discredited their own expert witness, many cases are coming back to court.

I'd have slightly more sympathy with Bates if he hadn't been happy to cook evidence regardless of the guilt or innocence of people in the first place, but qualified or not, I'd have to admit that he really is an expert now.

I have no sympathy with the police and believe that what they are terrified of is documentary evidence of their collusion, and the question of indecent images is just a handy excuse.

Bates presents no threat to minors - but he could be bloody dangerous to some peoples' pensions.

JuliaM said...

"Long story short - this is another one in the same bag as David Southall, Gene Morrison and Derek Draper. Expert who isn't get found out."

Certainly appears that way. Yet another case of 'never mind the quality, feel the convictions!'...

"Bates presents no threat to minors - but he could be bloody dangerous to some peoples' pensions."

And in the modern UK, that's the one crime that, it seems, will never be tolerated...