FRAMED! - part 25

There was a short recess after DS Tunn left the stand and the jury returned at 3.15pm. Defence counsel took the opportunity to examine Tunn again.

Bell: Did you recall the defendant’s Liverpool books – the books that he had written on the entire history of Liverpool Football Club from 1892?

Tunn: I recall he had a large collection of Liverpool FC memorabilia.

Now, a barrister acting in his client’s best interest would have robustly challenged the policeman at this point about Brian’s level of research and his intellectual abilities and whether the police had seen this as a threat in any way, but Bell failed to ask even these most straightforward of questions. In fact, during the unlawful search of Brian’s house on 4 June 2008, DS Tunn had stepped onto the loft ladder and peered into the loft (which Brian had neatly boarded out) and he noticed the large number of archive boxes neatly stacked and labelled (with help from his grand-daughter, Emily Birch) and asked what they contained. Brian told him that they contained the world’s largest private collection of newspaper reports on football matches played by Liverpool FC from 1892. What was remarkable was the fact that Tunn did not open a single archive box to check this fact out. He merely stepped off the loft ladder and closed the hatch. Remember the powers of the search warrant at this point: to thoroughly search the house for child pornography and all computer or computer-related paraphernalia. That loft could have contained thousands or even millions of indecent images and the detective failed to search it. We believe that the reason he did not search the loft was because he already knew that Brian was telling the truth. Brian had been an author since 1986 and is regarded in some quarters as the world’s leading authority on the history of Liverpool Football Club. It is inconceivable that the police would not have conducted this basic research on him before arresting him, since it is obvious that he had been “under obbo” (observation) for many months previously, since he uncovered the cover-up of child grooming in Lambeth.

With Tunn’s testimony complete, there was a short recess before Nicola Noone entered court as an ‘anti-character’ witness for Brian. She swore by Almighty God.

Forster: The jury needs to know who you are what you do.

Noone: I am a director of Off Centre, a charity in Hackney for young people up to the age of 25.  We provide support for people who have problems with drugs or alcohol and those who have been sexually abused. Referrals are made by people themselves or other agencies, such as doctors. The defendant started working with us on 9 January 2008 and was dismissed on 13 June 2008. Police removed his computer from Off Centre. They gave us full details of the allegations. In April 2009 he sent a request for a reference. We did not provide any references for him.

The emphasis above is ours. At this point, we need to pause and reflect on what Noone has told the Court. She admits that the charity Off Centre provides support for those who have been sexually abused – this corroborates what Brian told the police. She also confirmed the dates that he worked at Off Centre and the fact that the agency did not support Brian at all with character references. She continues:

Noone: His role was as a counsellor. This was never at a private house, but always in our offices. I don’t have with me the exact qualifications he had. I’m on the admin side.

Notice this further appalling admission by Noone: she is claiming that she does not have his exact qualifications with her despite being ‘on the admin side’ and despite being called to court in a criminal trial. This lapse was not picked up by the judge, the prosecutor (of course) or defence counsel.

Noone: He said he had been conducting research, but it was not official Off Centre research. The first I knew about any research was in a disciplinary meeting.

A reporter entered the court at this point.

Forster: Can you tell the court whether the defendant ever undertook staff training?

Noone: Not to my knowledge did he ever undertake staff training. I understood from John Hilton that he merely disseminated training information to others and never actually delivered training.

The emphasis is ours. We have shown in earlier chapters that Brian did undertake staff training on 28 March 2008 at the offices of Sub19. The evidence is noted in the Time Off In Lieu logbook and also Maya Walker’s diary. It is evident that Maya Walker ought to have been called by Bell to show the court these important documents. It is also evident that Nicola Noone is withholding evidence, because, as the Director for Administration, she would know what qualifications Brian had achieved in counselling and she was in possession of his application form for the initial post of counsellor and then his application for the post of Group Therapist in which he clearly informed Off Centre about his experience in counselling those who had been sexually abused.

With full knowledge of the laws of libel, the authors state that Nicola Noone committed perjury and perverted the course of justice. She is fully aware that he had taken Staff Training, and if she didn’t know, why didn’t she ask staff to provide such evidence? We are talking here about a man’s reputation and his liberty, so why weren’t such basic checks undertaken by her, the Trustees of Off Centre or the police?

We believe that these checks were actually taken, but once again they proved Brian’s innocence and seriously undermined the weak case against him.

Dominic Bell, whom - as defence counsel - one might expect to robustly cross-examine Noone and ensure the acquittal of his client, asked her about Off Centre and Sub19 as organisations.

Noone: There are 12 employees at Off Centre. Sub19 is a partner company. We shared staff and the defendant worked at Sub19 too. We have troubled souls.

Bell: But do you have any clients who have been sexually abused?

Noone: Yes, we have sexual abuse clients. I’d say that only about 5% of our clients have been sexually abused in childhood.

At this point, Bell might have been advised to ask her on what basis she was making such an assertion. She was not a counsellor, but an administrator and she never asked for such information from counsellors by which to arrive at such a conclusion. The figure of 5% had not been robustly corroborated or scientifically arrived at. The figure had been plucked from the air to make it seem as though it was an insignificant part of Brian’s role.

Bell: So do you encourage your counsellors to undertake continuous professional development?

Noone: There is always room for more learning.

Bell: Do some counsellors go to college independently to further their counselling knowledge?

Noone: Yes, some counsellors go to college.

Bell: Were you present when the defendant was appointed?

Noone: Yes, I interviewed him for the job. I’m a manager not a counsellor. The interim manager, Christine Mead, was a therapist. He was the best candidate for the job at the time. He was line managed. We have an individual training budget, but Off Centre had no control over further learning.

I didn’t know he attended college. I wouldn’t expect to know all courses taken by all counsellors.

This is an appalling admission by Noone. As the self-proclaimed Administrative Director (as she has just informed the Court), she had access to all the curricula vitae of all of the employees. He had, as we have seen in previous chapters, applied for the post of Group Therapist in April 2008 and on that application form he had, on page 3 of the 8-page form, included the following two entries:

Secondary and Higher Education/ Courses Attended
Examinations passed and professional qualifications obtained with grades and dates including current studies, if any
Dates	School/College/University	Course	Grades Obtained
2008	CPPD  (www.cppd.co.uk)	Advanced Diploma in Humanistic Integrative Counselling	Not graded
2007	CPPD  (www.cppd.co.uk)	Diploma in Humanistic Integrative Counselling	Not graded

There can be no doubt, therefore, that Nicola Noone was in possession of the information that she claimed not to have been in possession of. She claimed, “I didn’t know he attended college” and this is perjury. The Off Centre application form that Brian completed for the post of Group Therapist clearly asks candidates to provide evidence of examinations passed and evidence of ‘current studies’. This is unequivocal and this document provides incontrovertible evidence of Nicola Noone’s perjury.

Bell: Do you know if the defendant used to engage in conversations with other therapists around counselling research and theory?

Noone: I expect that counsellors share experience, yes.

Bell: Tell the court about the computer that my client used at Off Centre. Did he, for example, have his own computer and email address?

Noone: Yes, he had his own computer and dedicated email address at Off Centre. I can’t remember if I gave this to the police.

We find it inconceivable that a person claiming to be the Administrative Director of a charity would not have kept a record of whether she had given such important information to the police, and just as incredulous is the fact that she claims she could not remember such a fact. Nor does she tell the Court whether the police produced a forensic test against that computer (which they ought to have done as the result of seizing it). Nor does she tell the Court that all of Brian’s research – including his research into child sexual abuse for Staff Training – was wiped off the Off Centre main server on the day of his arrest on 4 June 2008.

Nor does Bell pursue this line of questioning.

Noone: We followed all legal procedures in getting rid of him in June 2008.

They didn’t. They breached Off Centre’s own policies and procedures and they breached several elements of the Employment Rights Act 1996. Noone is evidently trying to distance the charity from a claim for unlawful dismissal.

With defence counsel sitting down after letting perjury occur – this was known to him by documents that were produced to Angela Shaw and Bell himself – it was the prosecution’s turn to examine the witness.

Forster: Did you conduct an interview with him when dismissing him?

Noone: Yes, I didn’t consider his behaviour appropriate. He told me the conversation started in a global chatroom and then moved to MSN for a one-to-one chat.  He told John Hilton and me that he had known it wasn’t a 14-year-old girl and he said he had taken the piss. The organisation could no longer trust that individual. He had not been conducting research on our behalf and his job didn’t entail such research.

The witness than left the court – her part played out.

She had, in fact, misled the Court. Whilst Brian told police upon his arrest that he had been conducting research into child sexual abuse he did not tell them that he was doing it on behalf of Off Centre. He said it was necessary as part of his role at Off Centre, which the job application form proves. The purpose of witness Noone was to try to mislead the Court into the belief that Brian’s research was not part of his role at Off Centre because the Administrative Director had said that it wasn’t. The implication being that Brian must have lied. But he hadn’t lied at all – Noone had, and the evidence is incontrovertible.

At 3:45pm, the trial resumed before the jury. There was no real evidence against Brian, the charges had been fabricated and in order to give it the appearance of a real trial, time had to be filled with meaningless content. One example of this was where Forster decided to read out large extracts from Brian’s interviews with DS Tunn and DC Godfrey on 4 June 2008.

We have in our possession copies of the interviews between Godfrey, Tunn and Brian Pead, with his legal representative (not a solicitor), Marcia Weise present. Not a single one of the transcripts of interviews that day (there were three separate interviews) was signed. Not one record of interview had on it a unique reference number. Not one transcript had on it the tape counter times alongside what was being said. This is normal protocol. The entire trial had been built on thin air – just as the ‘girl’ had been a creation of the police in order to try to entrap people. It is evident from a thorough reading of the transcripts that they are nothing more than a ‘fishing expedition’ in the same manner in which Cathy Twist at Lambeth Council had conducted her ‘investigation’ into spurious allegations against Brian.  

On form MG15(T) – the transcript – Brian said, “I had no intention of meeting that ‘girl’. If I had any intention of meeting that ‘girl’, I would have given her my real number and clearly I didn’t. What I am interested in, in that chatroom, is what is this person doing in an adult escort chatroom masquerading as a 14-year-old girl?   

That section of the transcript was not read out in Court, yet it clearly shows Brian’s lack of intent to engage with a real 14-year-old and it is evident from his words that he always knew the person to be masquerading as a teenager. Why, then, did this trial ever come to court? Why had this trial cost hundreds of thousands of pounds? Why were the police so intent on destroying Brian’s life?

Forster and Godfrey were merely reading out sections of the transcript which had been taken out of context. Brian had told police that he had been considering writing a book about the adult escort industry after he had been involved with the Preventure programme whilst a Head Teacher at Lambeth. Both as a counsellor and as a human being, Brian is fascinated by the schema or blue-prints that are usually laid down in a person’s life from birth until the age of about seven or eight. Almost every action or pattern of behaviour from then onwards is based on the things they have learnt up until that point – the schema. Brian was fascinated by the Preventure programme run by King’s College in London because it sought to uncover the specific risk factors in teenagers between 14 and 16 to try to identify whether they had a potential for risky behaviour such as alcohol or drug abuse or a propensity to work in the sex industry.

Brian had been asked by Nadia Al-Khudhairy, a research therapist on the Preventure programme if he was minded to write a paper for a psychology journal about his teaching methods, but he had not developed that idea after his unlawful dismissal from Lambeth.

His training as a counsellor had sparked a renewed interest into not only his own sexual abuse in a children’s home, but in females who work in the sex industry. One of his counselling peers had lectured the group on trafficked (disempowered) women who usually have no say whatsoever in the work that they do, whereas Brian’s interest lay in those (empowered) women who actually made a conscious decision to sell their sexual favours for money and those who went into prostitution in order to feed their families, for example.

Yet none of this came out in Court, even though he had included this in his 64-page defence statement which Bell reduced down to less than half a page.

Forster and Godfrey were engaging in reading out extracts from the interview that the policewoman had had with Brian, but nothing of his esoteric reasoning for his interest emerged – the focus was entirely on the sexual questions that he had had on occasions with genuine escort workers. 

Brian could not understand why Bell was allowing this to take place. Having read the transcripts, it is evident that Bell ought to have intervened and asked what the relevance was of taking extracts from the interviews when the full context was not made explicit to the Court.

Nor did it emerge in Court that one of Brian’s plans was to create his own counselling school and charity for former prostitutes and workers in the sex industry who wanted to turn their lives around. The police had even seized a notebook from his house where he had drafted some initial plans about this. Friends and some colleagues knew of these plans – not one of them was asked to attend the trial.

The police were simply ‘cherry-picking’ any odd comment that related to sex for money.

The transcript of the third interview that the police put Brian through on 4 June 2008 (remember, too, that he had been arrested and handcuffed from just after 7am and it was now 7pm) shows that DC Godfrey asks “I am just going to speak to you a little bit about your Faceparty chat on 15 May 2008.”

This clearly proves that Brian did have such a conversation on Faceparty on 15 May and it was at his friend’s house in Chislehurst. Why, then, was this conversation never mentioned in Court? Why, then, did defence counsel Bell not ask about this specific conversation when he cross-examined the police officers?

On page 15 of the 20-page third interview transcript, DC Godfrey again mentions the date of 15 May 2008 and mentions a time, 9.30pm. This conversation clearly took place. Even the police admit to it – twice!

As the day drew to a close, Forster mentioned Brian’s dismissal from Lambeth Council.

Forster: Do you know if the defendant was dismissed by Lambeth Council? Did this come up in the course of your investigations?

Godfrey: Yes.

Now, why would that be mentioned at all? What purpose did it serve? From our collective points of view, we believe that it served a dual purpose: (i) to further try to defame Brian in open court and (ii) to unsettle Brian. However, we believe that it merely shows that this trial – built on thin air and based on witness statements which were not signed and which had no unique reference numbers – was a direct consequence of what he had uncovered whilst working for Lambeth Council.

 At 4.10pm, the trial ended for the day. Unsurprisingly, Dominic Bell had to “dash off to Wandsworth jail”, leaving his unsupported client fuming at what had masqueraded as British justice in Court 4 at Southwark Crown Court. The trial was scheduled to resume at 11.30 the following morning.