Five Months To Go

Can I get a witness?

If you know, you know.

And you also know that this all goes back to a conviction in a case that would not be brought after the Post Office scandal, because it depended on the computer inerrancy for which the Post Office had lobbied. "We do not have the document, but this is a computer simulation of it, showing what might have been the defendant's fingerprints or any of millions of other people's, if they had been real, which we do not suggest that they are." You could be convicted on that four years ago. I was. But good luck with it in front of a jury now.

In fact, even then, they had limited confidence in it, letting it be known that they were going to fold on the first day, before pulling out a "propensity" argument instead that morning. Still, I was formally convicted of that, and in its own terms it depended as I have set out. The jury had been expressly directed to "disregard" the concept of conviction beyond reasonable doubt, meaning that I was explicitly not so convicted.

Yet the latest lawfare is not dissimilar, and it alleges a breach of a restraining order that was imposed only because of an alleged breach of a suspended sentence that had been imposed because of that initial conviction. This is the complainant's third attempt to pervert the course of justice against me. The first two have been successful, with the second resulting in my imprisonment. But since 5th November, the Police have been aware in detail and from three continents that my guilty pleas were as unreliable as any subpostmaster's, that my initial conviction was also unsound, that the latest case against me was unpresentable, and that it was not I who ought to be in prison. When will the arrest be made? Are they going to wait until 19th June, to do it on the steps of Durham Crown Court?

Everything gets done at funerals, and yesterday, which is why this post is a day late, I not only paid court to someone whom no one pretended to believe that I had threatened to kill and who received me like family, a variation on something that happens fairly often, but I was also told from the very heart of the law enforcement Establishment in the North East that, "Everyone knows you're innocent." Get on with it, then.