DOZENS of men accused of downloading child pornography from the
internet may have been wrongly prosecuted, according to expert
prosecution and defence witnesses.
New evidence suggests that Operation Ore, Britain’s biggest
child pornography investigation, may have prosecuted innocent men
on the basis of discredited American police testimony and
questionable forensic methods.
Jim Bates, a computer expert who has served as a witness for
the prosecution or the defence 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 7,200 British suspects was supplied to British
police by American 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 1996-9.
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.
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,” said Bates.
He cites the case of Dr Paul Grout, a senior accident
specialist at Hull Royal Infirmary, who was falsely accused of
accessing child porn. Grout, who was praised for his help at the
2001 Selby rail crash, lost his £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 Grout had used his
credit card to pay for a meal in a restaurant in Yorkshire,
someone else had been using it 5,000 miles away in Lake Tahoe,
America.
In a case that legal experts believe may prove a landmark
judgment, Judge David Bentley threw out the prosecution argument.
In his judgment, Bentley dismissed some police evidence as “utter
nonsense”. He said the way the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had
held back some information vital to 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 The Sunday Times, 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.”
Bates believes that evidence, highlighted by Duncan Campbell,
an investigative journalist and an expert witness in some Ore
cases, could lead to many cases being dropped.
In an article in last week’s Sunday Times, Campbell revealed
that sworn statements provided in British courts by two American
detectives who initiated Operation Ore could no longer be relied
upon.
The two, Dallas detective Steve Nelson and US postal inspector
Michael Mead, had claimed that everyone who went to Landslide
always did so through a front-page screen button saying “Click
Here (for) Child Porn”.
But Campbell has established that the button was never on the
website’s front page. Instead it was on an advertisement for
another website buried deep in the Landslide website.
That discovery has effectively removed a key plank of many of
the Ore prosecutions where no actual child porn was found.
Those prosecutions were based on the assertion that evidence
that someone had paid to access Landslide automatically meant that
they had paid to access child porn.
Steve Barker, a solicitor who acts for one Operation Ore
suspect in a High Court appeal, said that in many prosecutions
police were unable to disprove defendants had simply accessed
legal adult porn rather than paedophile material. In other cases,
child porn might have been accessed accidentally by those looking
for adult porn.
The CPS has also disclosed that an internal inquiry has raised
serious questions over the evidence provided by Brian Underhill, a
key police witness in some 600 Ore cases. The CPS said it would
now disclose the doubts raised by its inquiry to defence
solicitors before future trials began.
The CPS last week defended its role in the hundreds of
successful cases in which defendants had pleaded guilty. A
spokeswoman said: “Each case was considered on its own merits and
the evidence provided by police has been subject to thorough
scrutiny.”
