‘My anger may have subsided just enough for me to write this piece but it will not allow me to look at this utter failure of a legal system, chock full of the biased and plain dumb, and pretend it is any kind of exemplar of the pursuit of truth and justice. It shot down my career and mental health as an accused innocent, and now it has shot down my two daughters when we sat on the prosecution side of the system.’
This is not about the rioters and how the law has dealt with them. This is much more important: well more of a long term topical urgency, and slightly deeper, than that.
Those who know me know - don’t just “believe” - that I was falsely accused of a sex crime in 2016. The story is one I told in 2018 to the International Men’s Conference in London. I have been campaigning, ever since that ludicrous charge was dropped, to raise awareness of how the UK Criminal Justice system systematically and criminally defeats justice. Also how the falsely accused, even if not taken through the courts, can still have lives wrecked - and yes it does cause suicides.
Most people know about Andy Malkinson now - and many about Brian Buckle and the £500,000 his family scraped together, because it cost that much to get his innocence recognised and his release from jail. They are two whose names have made headlines, but many who remain publicly nameless also remain in jail as wrongly convicted innocent men.
Those involved in campaigning know about Jemma Beale and Eleanor Williams, the serial false accusers sent to prison for perverting justice, but no one remembers the names of, or even how many, men whose lives they wrecked.
I don’t believe 99% of people really understand what has happened with regard to victims of this twin-set of crimes: rape, and perverting justice with false rape accusations. Nor the travesty of what the law actually does, rather than says it does, which I continue to expose and hope to change.
That travesty is that we have a police force trained to not just “believe the victim” but also to misidentify genuine rape victims as liars, with their vagueness and poor memory of much of the event; and false accusers, with their certainty about gory details, as genuine. This is what sits behind the danger I have always seen, but have perhaps not highlighted enough.
Growing public awareness of false accusations being very common means that while the police and CPS have been told it is “in the public interest” to charge all rape cases where the police have presented a reasonable case file, the chance of a conviction for the genuine cases has been progressively more undermined during the past five years or so. If this was just the false accusation cases I would be happy to see prosecutions fail, but the manner of that police coaching means that real rape victims are at least as likely to see their case fail as false accusers who manage to get all the way to the witness box.
I am not a qualified lawyer but as well as research and an investigative nose applied to publicised cases, I have a wide range of experiences of the criminal justice system. This is due to having done two separate two week sessions of jury service, and been a (trainee) probation officer who had to write for and present in court. I’ve also prepared social enquiry reports for magistrates, been a witness in three entirely separate trials, been a defendant in one and a witness in another sex crime trial.
I have also long campaigned to end the named law of “rape”, whilst keeping the strength of punishments, in the belief that if the offence was simply name-shifted sideways so as to be the high tariff end of sexual assault. If this were done juries would be less likely to be misguided by a sense of fear of convicting someone - of causing this subconscious notion of a “fate worse than death”. I believe the emotional reaction to the word clouds the judgement of all involved.
Some people who know me believe that, having had my career ended and life heavily ruined for at least 6 years by a false rape allegation, I would somehow be on the “other side” if I also support rape victims in getting justice. Nothing could be further from the truth - and truth is the moot point here, the one common factor that I am persistently pursuing.
Recently, Newport Crown Court saw a bullying, grooming, lying, GBH committing, rapist walk free from the dock, despite having the most pathetic defence barrister I have ever seen, one so hopeless I would pay him NOT to be on my side. Unfortunately, the much younger CPS barrister was also somewhat more interested in his forthcoming holiday than presenting a convincing case.
So the accused man walked. The two sisters the now free man had assaulted collapsed at home on hearing the verdict and were in a suicidal state - and were so for five days.
Every witness swore, as witnesses do, to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But the reality is that no one is ever able to speak that “whole truth”. The concept is a lie. The courts are absolutely unable to gainsay their own oath-embedded lie, because in this and many other cases, a justice system cannot take six months to hear it all. The rules on evidence admissibility may leave witnesses and victims fuming with frustration, but they do make sure that lawyers can go on holiday and remain all bound together in the wig and gown club.
In the judge’s summing up I heard him lay down the steps and rules that guided the jury. In each sentence he explained reasonable doubt and included the phrase, “…then you must find him not guilty”. So despite it all being a perfectly legitimate explanation of the decision making process, the fact remained that the jury heard the judge say “then you must find him not guilty” nine times.
You don’t need a degree in psychology to know that this really strongly constitutes “priming”, and as a jury, these words coming from the judge would almost certainly have a not too subtle effect on each and every individual.
So due to the absence of the whole truth as per normal, the jury retired to consider their verdict without the knowledge of the rapist’s violent nature, the threat he posed, and the very nature of the absence of evidence that limited what they had heard in the four short days the trial lasted. But they did so with the phrase “not guilty” strongly embedded in their consciousness by the judge.
If you have any doubt that this priming effect is real, study the research that shows why No Smoking signs make smokers more likely to have a cigarette - even if they do go around the next corner to do so. My point may sound vaguely academic and I may sound like I am biased against the legal system. Well, yes, I confess I am biased, but the reason it is not “academic” is because I have, as they say, skin in the game: beautiful skin at that.
It is my own two daughters whose rapist assailant “got away with it”.
My anger may have subsided just enough for me to write this piece but it will not allow me to look at this utter failure of a legal system, chock full of the biased and plain dumb, and pretend it is any kind of exemplar of the pursuit of truth and justice. It shot down my career and mental health as an accused innocent, and now it has shot down my two daughters when we sat on the prosecution side of the system.
Will this existential threat, a corrupted justice system upon which our very society is founded, ever breach the consciousness of people whose lives are still just potentially at risk of such injustice?
How can I effectively warn the innocents in waiting, as I tried to warn my daughters, that the system is not about providing justice nor of seeking the truth, but in that good old fashioned manner of long standing institutions all about protecting and sustaining itself?
I curse anyone who will happily destroy lives with appeasement of the lie about the whole truth. I can no longer be harmed by the bullets whizzing past my ears from barristers, secret or otherwise; nor by Feminists, wrong; or even more wrong, by emotionally and literally bankrupt crooks who live by the rapists creed.
By Patrick Graham
Patrick Graham is director of documentary film "We Believe You" and a coordinator of FASO (False Allegations Support Organisation)
Comments