MURDERER FREED ON A TECHNICALITY

Guilt doesn't matter in Britain, apparently

Police were criticised by three Court of Appeal judges yesterday for illegally bugging private conversations between solicitors and a man accused of hiring a killer to shoot his wife’s lover. Eddie Grant, 41, who was serving 18 years after his conviction in 2003, was freed after the judges ruled his subsequent conviction unsafe. The case was the third to founder in as many years because of the practice of Lincolnshire detectives of eavesdropping on privileged conversations in the exercise yards of police stations. The Court of Appeal concluded that Mr Grant’s conviction should be overturned on the ground that the trial judge should have stayed the proceedings because there had been an abuse of process. Mr Grant was convicted at Lincoln Crown Court of conspiring to murder Ian Dowling, 39, after he started a relationship with Mr Grant’s wife, Amanda, 36, a school dinner lady.

Mrs Grant had left the family home, taking the couple’s three children with her, and rented a house in Grantham, Lincolnshire, before Mr Dowling moved in. On the evening of March 15, 2001, Mr Dowling answered a knock at the door where he was confronted by an unknown gunman who shot him fatally in the chest. The Crown’s case was that the embittered husband recruited two men — who were acquitted on trial — to take revenge. Mr Grant’s lawyers submitted at his trial that, though there had been a conspiracy to assault Mr Dowling, it had been called off by the time of his death. Mr Dowling, they contended, might have been killed by criminal associates known to deal in drugs.

Mr Justice Astill, the trial judge, had dismissed a defence application for an order to stay the proceedings as an abuse of process. He had also, the appeal court concluded, failed to get to grips with the significance of the “wall of silence” concerning the identity of the officer who proposed the installation of a device in the yard in the Grant case. In the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Laws rebuked police for the bugging operation. Sitting with Dame Heather Steel and Judge Martin Stephens, QC, he said: “The case put forward for the appellant, then and now, is that the police had deliberately eavesdropped upon and taperecorded privileged conversations between the appellant and his solicitor, which took place in the exercise yard at Sleaford police station.”

He said this was one of three cases in which the police had placed covert listening devices there and at Grantham police station. “We are quite clear that the deliberate interference with a detained suspect’s right to the confidence of privileged communications with his solicitor seriously undermines the rule of law,” he said. Conversations between Mr Grant and his solicitors were recorded, though no material of evidential value was picked up, the court was told.

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STUPID VERDICT

What harm was done? A boy got lucky: So what? Rigid adherence to rules is no substitute for justice

A female teacher who pleaded guilty to having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy will spend six months in prison after originally being given a suspended sentence. The Victorian Court of Appeal today overturned the original 22-month suspended sentence imposed by a County Court judge on mother-of-three Karen Louise Ellis, 37. Following the crown prosecutor's appeal against the sentence, the court resentenced her to two years and eight months' jail, suspending all but six months. Ellis had pleaded guilty to six counts of sexual penetration with a boy under 16.

Ellis's lawyer Chester Metcalfe said his client was distraught. "She's pretty devastated; we're all devastated," Mr Metcalfe said outside the court. "She's taking it pretty hard at the moment as you can expect. "It's been a pretty long road." Ellis had not yet spoken to her family and might consider an appeal, Mr Metcalfe said. "We're looking at that at the moment," he said. "We haven't had a good chance to go through the judgment at the moment. We'll look at the rights of appeal but she's devastated as you can expect."

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