Child porn cases
Date: July 10, 2005Source: The Australian
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New evidence suggests that Operation Ore, Britain's biggest child pornography investigation, may have prosecuted innocent men on the basis of discredited US police testimony and questionable forensic methods.
Jim Bates, a computer expert who has served as a witness 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 7200 British suspects was supplied to British police by US 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 1996-99.
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.
Mr 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," Mr Bates said.
He cites the case of Paul Grout, a senior accident specialist at Hull Royal Infirmary, who was falsely accused of accessing child porn. Dr Grout, who was praised for his help at the 2001 Selby rail crash, lost his pound stg. 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 Dr Grout had used his credit card to pay for a meal in a restaurant in Yorkshire, someone else had been using it in Lake Tahoe, in the US.
In a case that legal experts believe may prove a landmark judgment, judge David Bentley threw out the prosecution argument. In his judgment, Justice Bentley dismissed some police evidence as "utter nonsense". He said the way the Crown Prosecution Service had held back some information vital to Dr 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 Britain's The Sunday Times, Mr 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."
The CPS last week defended its role in the hundreds of successful cases in which defendants had pleaded guilty.
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