FRAMED! - part 12

27

The trial for alleged Exposure did not take place, after all, on 2 February 2009. It had been mysteriously adjourned at the last minute and he was, instead, called away to Charing Cross police station where he was charged with “...inciting a child aged under 16 to engage in sexual activity...”

Note that the age group has now changed from the earlier one of under-13 to this one of under-16.

Note that he has been charged with ‘Incitement’ and not an ‘attempt to incite’. This is of crucial significance, as will be discussed in a later chapter.

Note that he was first investigated in this matter as long ago as January 2008, though the authors believe he was under surveillance and a ‘person of interest’ even before that.

Article 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998 confers the Right to a Fair Trial on defendants:

“…Article 6(1) In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law…”

The emphasis is the authors’. Regrettably, the Human Rights Act (HRA) does not actually specify what constitutes ‘a reasonable time’, but in practice it appears that most trials will be conducted within a few months and usually within a year of a defendant being arrested.

However, it is not widely known that the clock actually starts ticking not at the time of arrest as one might imagine, but from the moment that the police commence an investigation. The reason for this is, again, common sense. Were this caveat not in place, it could lead to all sorts of abuses of process.

On their own admission, the police had been monitoring Brian from January 2008. It was now February 2009 – some 14 months after they had first started their investigations (if we subscribe to their version of events). By charging him, the police were already dangerously close to a breach of the HRA because they would not be able to bring him to trial ordinarily for at least another two months, by which time the ‘reasonable time’ limit would surely be stretched beyond credibility and fairness.

But to return to the case for Exposure at Woolwich Crown Court.

Having been adjourned, it was re-scheduled for Monday 9 February 2009.

However, on Friday 6 February, Brian was required to attend Court for a last-minute hearing to ensure that both parties were ready to go to trial on the following Monday.

Brian attended with Maya Walker. Up until this stage, she been supportive and had taken a keen interest in the case. Being from Slovenia she was not too familiar with the legal system of England and Wales. She was also outraged about Elizabeth McIntyre, whom she had herself witnessed performing and putting on shows.

The prosecutor was Timothy Forster. The judge was Charles Byers. The defence counsel was Pamela Brain.

Being a self-proclaimed anorak, Brian started researching both the prosecutor and the judge. (He had already undertaken some research into Pamela Brain. He is a man who likes to be forewarned.)

Living in Kilburn, the 6ft 3in tall Forster, who described himself as ‘carrying some extra baggage’, had been practising at the Criminal Bar for 17 years. At the time of the trial he was 41 years old, married with two children. (The authors will spare their blushes by refraining from printing their names here.)

Timothy Forster was, in some ways, not unlike Brian Pead because he was an avid collector of music, especially from the USA in the late 1960s. He describes himself as ‘obsessive’. He also used to be in a band called ‘Gay Dad’, though elsewhere describes his sexual orientation as ‘straight’.

Forster describes himself as a music journalist, a record collector and ‘wearer of colourful clothes’.

A smoker and a drinker, the Piscean Forster also described himself as an agnostic white Caucasian. <source: www.myspace.com/timothy_forster>. The data in the above paragraphs was still valid as of 12 December 2009.

The Hearing itself was procedural. Judge Byers asked Forster, “Are your witnesses ready to go?”

“Yes, m’Lord,” replied the self-proclaimed obsessive music collector prosecutor.

“There are three female witnesses, Elizabeth McIntyre, Natalie Ryan and Katie Prouse?’

“Yes, m’Lord.”

“And they have been informed of the trial date and they are ready to attend on Monday?”

“Yes, m’Lord.”

“Apart from the police officer in the case, are there any other witnesses?”

“No, m’Lord,” responded the prosecutor.

“Well then, it seems to me that we are all ready to go. Can you assure me, Mr Forster, that your female witnesses are ready to go?”

“Yes, m’Lord.”

Note that judge Charles Byers asked the prosecutor on three separate occasions whether his female witnesses – the students who had lived at 62 Days Lane - were ‘ready to go’. On all three occasions, prosecutor Forster said that his witnesses had been given the date of the trial and that they were, indeed, ‘ready to go’.

Brian left the courtroom and found a space behind a pillar to gather his thoughts.

He could not be seen behind this pillar and before long he heard a familiar voice – that of Timothy Forster. He was speaking with DC Saib, the officer in the case.

 “So, where are the girls then?” asked Forster.

“In a hotel nearby,” replied DC Saib.

The fact that the females were nearby meant, of course, that the trial could go ahead on the following Monday.

The weekend of 7 and 8 February 2009 was naturally a tense one for Brian and his partner, Maya Walker.

On Monday 9 February 2009, the day of the trial at Woolwich Crown Court, Maya drove to the Court.

They parked a little way from the building and walked to the Court, crossing the busy dual carriageway.

They met Pamela Brain outside the court. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, she then led them into the courtroom.

Forster was there. Judge Byers was there. Pamela Brain was there (as defence counsel in the exposure case). Brian Pead was there. Maya Walker was there. Dominic Bell was there (as defence counsel in the incitement case). The Court usher was there. The Court clerk was there. The officer in the case was there.

The females were nowhere to be seen.

28

 Ordinarily, there would have been no case to answer because the females had not arrived at Court. On the previous Friday, Forster had assured Judge Byers that the females were ‘ready to go’, but they had not now shown up.

The trial had been deliberately collapsed to gain an unlawful advantage, there had been a deliberate abuse of process, and the police officer and the Crown were guilty of perverting the course of justice.

Katie Prouse lived in Plymouth and she had journeyed up from that city on Friday 6 February 2009 to attend the trial. Why would she do that if – as Forster lied to the Judge – the police had ‘got the dates wrong’?

This trial could have gone ahead in any event because it was not necessary for all three witnesses to be at the trial as the Crown claimed.

However, Forster and the officer in the case, DC Saib, the man who offered Brian a deal to accept ‘only a caution’ back in the police station at Bexleyheath on 20 May 2008, came up with a solution. Instead of natural justice taking place and Brian walking free, Forster and Saib concocted a plan.

“Your honour, if I might explain,” ventured Forster.

“Go on.”

“The police inadvertently gave the witnesses the wrong date, m’lord.”

“The wrong date? You told me only on Friday that they were ready to go.”

“Yes, I’m sorry m’lord. But the officer in the case put the wrong date on the letters that were sent out to the witnesses.”

“Well, I’m not very happy about this at all. It leaves me in a bit of a predicament.”

At this point, Byers consulted with the clerk to the Court. After a few moments, he looked up and said, “I’m going to give the prosecution one more chance. Can I have a date for a new trial?”

Clerk: March.

Forster: They won’t be able to make March, m’lord, because they are involved in a college production.

[Authors’ note: Research has shown that Natalie Ryan’s CV lists all of the productions that she has been associated with. She was not involved in any college production at the time Forster claims here – Judge Byers was misled.]

Byers: I should have thought they would want this case out of the way as soon as possible. [To the Clerk]. Please suggest a new date.

Clerk: April.

Forster: They won’t be able to make that because one of the girls is going on a cruise.

Byers: [Incredulously] Please provide me with another date.

Clerk: May.

Forster: They won’t be able to make that date either because they have their dissertations to finish and hand in.

Byers: Well, there is a date in the calendar of 27 May 2009 and they had better be ready for that trial.

That may well read as a sketch in a comedy, but it actually happened and the Court records (and the judge’s notes, as well as Pamela Brain’s notes) show that this farce actually played out in a criminal court in England in the year 2009.

Thus the prosecution had another bite of the cherry. We ask ‘Whatever happened to natural justice?’

Forster then attempted to pervert the course of justice again. (The authors invite a trial for Defamation.)

“The prosecution makes an Application for Joinder. Mr Pead has two defence counsel, Ms Brain and Mr Bell, and we see no reason for the public purse to be subjected to such expense. The Crown submits that the two cases are Joined and tried together and that the defendant has only one defence counsel for both cases.”

“Is the case for Incitement ready?”

“The defendant has been sending emails to several women…”

“Is the matter available to try?”

 “No, m’lord.”

“The second case is a bail matter and likely to take a while to come to trial. It won’t be fixed until about February 2010. Why is the Incitement case not ready for case management?”

“Well, m’lord, the defendant disposed of his laptop.”

Note that each time Forster is asked a reasonable and legitimate question by the judge, he fails to answer it and uses the questions to attempt to further defame Brian Pead. That he disposed of his laptop is not in question. That it contained child pornography is certainly in question because it did not. It had simply broken down beyond repair.

“Well, I have to think of these female witnesses. It isn’t in their interest to put off a trial until 2010. You won’t get an earlier case in London. It is not in anybody’s interest to try a matter of May 2008 in February 2010. What has occurred here today is appalling. I am not prepared to countenance it any further. The trial needs to be set for 27 May 2009. The defendant is entitled to closure in this matter.”

The emphasis is the authors’ – on 9 February 2009, Judge Byers declared in open court that it was not fair to the Defendant (Brian Pead) that this matter should be dragging on and that he was entitled to ‘closure’.

Prosecutor Forster’s Myspace profile declared himself to be obsessive, and it seemed an accurate description when he then mentioned the Incitement case, which he was to also prosecute.

He seemed to be trying the patience of Judge Byers.

“Are the CPS going to get someone to measure Mr Pead’s bedroom in his house? It seems to me that it ought to be done. Mr Callow has entered cogent and relevant evidence with scientific measurements … is anyone going to check these measurements on behalf of the Crown? Indeed, what are the CPS going to say to Mr Callow?”

[A pause for thinking time].

“The Incitement case can go back to Southwark,” said Byers. “The case is not ready. There should be a Section 39 Order for reporting restrictions.”

It can be seen from this exchange that judge Charles Byers is drawing the prosecutor’s notice to the fact that Brian Pead had instructed a former surveyor for British Telecom to visit his house and prepare a set of professional drawings which showed the height of the windowsills in Brian’s house, the (low) height of the ceilings, the distance between the two houses and the angle between the houses. All of these measurements had been meticulously drafted by John Callow, who had also taken a second set of photographs to go alongside those taken by Maya Walker.

Yet Byers mentions that the Crown Prosecution Service had not even asked the police to take their own set of measurements. The reason for this will soon become apparent.

Forster obsessively applied for Joinder. This is a legal term in which two different counts are put together (‘joined’) against a defendant. Forster was attempting to claim that there were two separate indictments against Brian and that because both of them were of a sexual nature against younger females, they should be heard together before the same jury.

Do not confuse the words ‘counts’ and ‘charges’. ‘Counts’ refers to the number of instances a person has committed the same crime – for example, a burglar might burgle three houses in one evening. The ‘charge’ would be burglary, but there will be three ‘counts’ of burglary (or three occasions on which the same crime was committed.)

Brian, however, had two completely separate ‘charges’ against him: one of exposure, the other of incitement. They are separate in law. The manner in which a defendant carries out each crime would be different – one would be that he exposed himself to real people, the other alleged crime is that he incited someone via the internet.

For good reasons, there are very strict rules around Joinder because it is obvious that this rule could be abused and a defendant might not receive a fair trial as the result of mis-Joinder.

The authors offer the following extract from Archbold by way of explanation:

“…Rule 14.2(3) of the Criminal Procedure Rules 2005, provides that an indictment may contain more than one count if all the offences charged are (a) founded on the same facts, or (b) form or are part of a series of offences charged of the same or similar character…” 

Put simply, this means that a single indictment (or charge) may contain more than one count if – and only if – each misdemeanour is founded on the same facts or forms part of a series of offences.

By way of example, if a person has burgled three houses, he may be prosecuted under one indictment of burglary but have to answer to three counts because all of the burglaries were similar in their execution and they formed part of a series of house break-ins.

However, if a man steals a television set from a shop, for example, and then steals a car in the street, it would not be right or proper to try these crimes under one indictment because the commission – or execution – of each offence is very different in nature. And they might not have formed part of a series of thefts because it is likely that the thefts were executed differently.

In this situation, the Crown Prosecutor was attempting to sway the judge into believing that Brian Pead had committed two offences - both of a sexual nature (it was alleged) – and that they formed part of a series of offences against younger women.

There was no validity to that argument, of course, because (if we accept that both offences actually occurred), one was perpetrated against a lone under-aged female on the internet, and the other was perpetrated against three 20-something females in the ‘real world’. Although both might be described as sexual offences (and this is precisely what the CPS wanted them to be seen as), the manner of committing each offence was vastly different.

Alive to the Criminal Procedure Rules, Judge Byers was not convinced by Forster’s arguments, stating quite forcefully that “they are wholly different allegations and the only reason to Join is to prejudice the Defendant.”

The emphasis is the Authors’. Judge Byers has explained that there is no legal basis for Joinder to be exercised, and if the two cases were to be joined, then it would prejudice the defendant. This was said in open court and before a witness – Maya Walker.

With a new date set for a trial, with the Incitement case being sent back to Southwark Crown Court, and with Joinder having been rightly refused on the grounds that there was “no common nexus (similarity)”, we now arrive at the reasons why the CPS wanted a delay and deliberately collapsed the trial. The trial transcript will show that the Crown had applied for Joinder with a separate Indictment of inciting a child to engage in some form of sex (not penetration).

The trial transcript will show that Defence counsel on the Incitement case (Dominic Bell) asked for the trial to be moved to a different court because there had been a newspaper report in the local press about the forthcoming Incitement trial. Strangely, there had been no such mention of the Exposure case in the local press presumably for the reason that the females in the case (the alleged ‘victims’) did not want to be named.

The authors imagine that some readers might well be thinking that all this could not possibly have happened, and, if that is the case, we refer them to the trial transcripts. We refer them to Brian Pead’s contemporaneous notes. And we suggest that they contact Judge Byers, Timothy Forster, Dominic Bell and Pamela Brain. We suggest that they also contact Sarah Morris, from 1 Inner Temple Lane, who deputised for Pamela Brain. And, of course, we suggest that they contact Maya Walker so that she can give them her own account of the farce that masqueraded as ‘the finest legal system in the world’.

Brian was so angry at the farce that he was moved to write a lengthy letter to Sarah Morris in which he stated that Forster and Saib had conspired to ensure that the females did not attend the trial because they sought Joinder, that he wanted his defence counsel to mount a legal challenge to the judge’s decision to proceed with the trial once the females had failed to show, that the police had failed to conduct an investigation and were merely relying on the ‘evidence’ of the three witness statements, that his defence counsel should inquire of the police the name of the hotel that Katie Prouse stayed at, that his defence counsel should write to Rose Bruford College in Sidcup to obtain written evidence that the students were, in fact, involved in a college production (as if this would be a reason to postpone a criminal trial), and that he wanted his defence counsel to contact Victim Support to inquire whether the females actually used their service (which we believe they would have done had they genuinely been ‘traumatised’ as they had claimed in their unsigned witness statements.)

In the event, his defence counsel did not act upon a single one of Brian’s legitimate and reasonable requests.

Having had the trial for Exposure deliberately collapsed when the alleged ‘victims’ failed to turn up in Court, Brian Pead was forced to attend Charing Cross police station on 16 February 2009 at 4pm.

He was formally charged at 16:07. The charge read:

“…Offender 18 or over cause/ incite a girl 13 to 15 to engage in sexual activity – penetration – SOA 2003.

Between 28 January 2008 and 8 May 2008 within the area of Central Criminal Court, London, being a person aged 18 or over, you attempted to intentionally caused or incited a girl aged 14, not reasonably believing she was aged 16 or over, to engage in sexual activity involving the penetration of her mouth with a person’s penis.

Contrary to Section 10(1)(a), (b), (c)(1) and (2) of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Contrary to Section 1(1) Criminal Attempts Act 1981…”

Ignoring the obvious grammatical flaws with regard to mixed tenses in the charge, the precise language of the charge is of great significance. The very section of the Act is also of great significance. The dates are of great significance.

On its face, the charge looks bad. This charge has been shown to dozens of people – every single one of them believed, when reading it, that a real girl existed, that she was 14 and that Brian had caused or incited this real girl to engage in sexual activity. This is the smoke and mirrors - the sleight of hand - as practised by the legal profession. There never was a girl and Brian always knew this.

Brian had thus been charged with something the police might well have charged him with on 4 June 2008 – some eight months earlier. He had not, in fact, incited anyone under 16 (or over 16) to engage in sexual activity, but the drama that was unfolding was taking the following course: in order to turn Brian’s attention away from the skulduggery at Lambeth, he was arrested for exposure and then incitement. The trial for exposure was collapsed – the Authors say deliberately – and the CPS applied for Joinder of two entirely different alleged offences. The incitement case had been sent back to Southwark and no doubt the CPS would re-apply for Joinder so that the same jury would hear such terrible things that were alleged to have occurred between a grey-haired middle-aged man and younger females. The Crown needed a conviction of a sexual nature against Brian Pead so that he would be discredited about his findings at Lambeth and on Faceparty.

But we must now examine – and examine very carefully – the charge sheet and the alleged offence.