GD is going to love this one - Rape case collapse

A targetted review of a digital download is appropriate to establishing 'quick time' lines of enquiry early in an investigation where time is paramount.
In this case, shouldn't that have been sufficient early on in the process to prevent the case going to court?

That is, before a thorough review of the whole data set was to be prepared to be sent to the CPS.

The initial "quick time" review of the most important/ most relevant message - as you just yourself described - should have shown overwhelmingly that the man was innocent?
 
according to the barrister he shouldn't have even been charged based on the texts let alone get as far as going to court
 

I have already confirmed that an early stage the phone download could have been skimmed over and may well have raised some questions that the police may have been advised to deal with early on before pursuing the case further.

I will just have to leave it to other forum readers to draw their own conclusions on your original post and what you were saying.

I'll just repeat that in rape cases like this that you can't conduct a quick review of such a download before seeking advice to send a case to court where a suspect is on bail.

This of course does not prevent police from looking at information from such a report at any key points to help assist an investigation earlier on.

I think we have suitably talked this point round in circles enough by this point so I'll leave it there.
 
In this case, shouldn't that have been sufficient early on in the process to prevent the case going to court?

That is, before a thorough review of the whole data set was to be prepared to be sent to the CPS.

The initial "quick time" review of the most important/ most relevant message - as you just yourself described - should have shown overwhelmingly that the man was innocent?

Depending on the context of the messages and the other evidence (which we largely don't know anything about ), most importantly, the complaints statement... what you say is entirely correct.
 
I have already confirmed that an early stage the phone download could have been skimmed over and may well have raised some questions that the police may have been advised to deal with early on before pursuing the case further.
Without evidence of malice I think we should assume spectacular incompetence.

The police failing to use the evidence that was right in front of them (they had the phone and all the messages), is really disturbing.
 
Without evidence of malice I think we should assume spectacular incompetence.

The police failing to use the evidence that was right in front of them (they had the phone and all the messages), is really disturbing.

All I can say is that the press do have a habit of being rather selective of what they report and don't report. They after all are really in the business of selling papers (or increasingly clicks on web pages).

Based on what we have seen i would (subject to context and what the complaint had already stated in her report/ statement) have expected the police to go back to the complaint and ask some further questions about the messages on the phone.... Speculatively speaking such actions may well have resulted in police being able to close the investigation without much further investigation and prevented the suspect being on bail for so long and being charged in the first place.
 
As expected your post is pretty much a text book example of an argument from ignorance.... I bet you go down a storm with your friends when you liken their jobs to tech support.... Still didn't expect much more given your choice of username and don't think their is anything constructive to be gained from me responding to any further comments you decide to make with regards to this matter.


Phone examination is not a particularly difficult area of forensic examination but it' is still one requiring some knowledge and experience especially in understanding how to interpret the results provided and limitations of the systems used in producing physical and logical downloads from digital devices such as mobile phones.

The difficult part is not necessarily the download part so much as giving evidence about such downloads and the limitations of the hardware and software used. Not quite something to be likened to 'tech support' which typically involves no more than reading a prompt on a screen in front of you whilst selecting pre selected options on a support package. You can't rely on Google or some mates you may or may not have seen doing something vaguely related in an office when you are giving evidence in court.

It is also a potentially time consuming task to both produce and review evidential downloads of certain digital devices as previously outlined.


None of which matters, firstly a user name is a user name, nothing more or less, anyone trying to ascertain the content of someone's character by the username they use is idiotic.

Second, my friends who do the work call it tech support. You're hooking up a cable, downloading data and logging it by and large. This isn't difficult work, it can be time consuming... it can certainly be time consuming to catalogue in meticulous detail 40k messages... but that was never what anyone claimed wasn't true. What was said is, there is a clear time line for the offences and two stories being told. He said she was texting him to initial sex after the supposed rapes occur and she was texting him violent and rape fantasies. Even without this, it's common sense to a 12 yr old to check the texts not from order of the phone being bought, not back to front, but centred around the time the incidents occurred. She's alleging she was raped on several specific dates, not just some time between a point in the past and now and it's guesswork. you keep arguing this point and that you haven't seen the dates mentioned.... but you have no need for this. Again it's utterly common sense, start at the supposed incidents then expand out from there.

If the first 3 days you check are her asking him to come over and bang him again while sharing naughty fantasies with him at the same time bragging with her friends you can pick up the phone, talk the investigating officer and bring up that evidence immediately. YOu're talking about logging this and long times to download, but in reality you can read those texts, immediately see the story is flawed massively and immediately take steps to let those involved know that initial investigation into these texts immediately throws doubt on her story. This can be done within hours, you don't even need to download the data to get to this point, you have the phone to get the data from, you could literally look at the texts from the days in question and in this case would immediately suspect she was lying.

So while I haven't made the arguments you claim, and you keep trying to get around the basic things people are saying to you, you've attacked my character twice in this one post alone based off absolutely nothing and made a false claim that I was making an argument from ignorance.

Again as it appears to me, you were trying to make the software sound more difficult to use than it is, you were trying to make downloading the data sound more difficult than it is and you were trying to imply that your expertise brought deeper insight none of us had..... and the two 'insights' you brought to the table were things we all brought up earlier in the thread. When your trained insight is no different to opinions already mentioned and you're massively over stating how difficult the job is then yes, people won't take your opinion with a lot of weight.
 

I think I have been quite clear by this point that, from what we know, police could likely have, at an early stage, decided to speak again to the complaint about the messages on the phone without needing to review the whole download and that such an action may well have brought this case to a much quicker conclusion.

You seem to have at least conceded that reviewing the totality of such a report would be at least be a rather time consuming process. Again this doesn't seem to have been the issue here rather the police officers view on what he could / could out disclose to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Your friends may joke about their day to day activities but 'tech support workers' don't get called to court to give expert evidence on a piece of forensic examination.
 
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None of which matters, firstly a user name is a user name, nothing more or less, anyone trying to ascertain the content of someone's character by the username they use is idiotic.

I suspect that, especially more recently. A Username is an after thought.

After trying to create a new account only to find that, for the 15th time, the name you have chosen is rejected because it has already been taken. (And especially if it is a crap website that requires you to go right back to the start and fill in all the other information all over again before resubmitting with a new username) People will just resort to picking something silly and off the wall.
 
Yea it's stupid. The accuser has broken the law by lying to the court (on top of falsifying the whole rape claim and trying to hide evidence), so she should be exposed just like he was. She is not the victim, he is.
 
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Yea it's stupid. The accuser has broken the law by lying to the court (on top of falsifying the whole rape claim and trying to hide evidence), so she should be exposed just like he was. She is not the victim, he is.

Honestly, if I was falsely accused I would probably top myself if I got sent to jail for something I didnt do.

That guy has had 4 and a half years of his life taken away from him that he can never get back. That will have financial, emotional, psychological repercussions for all his life. Yet she doesnt even get to be named?

IMHO she should be sent away for the same time he served.
 
The dates don't work.

He said the evidence was disclosed 8 working days before the trial. His trial started on 11th December, 'working days' doesn't include weekends, and so it would have been before the trial of Liam Allen, whose case collapsed on December 14th.

Anyway, this guy's case came to it's conclusion and he was found not guilty. His case didn't collapse because of new evidence

The key evidence was not disclosed for 14 months.

None of these cases involve new evidence. They involve crucial evidence that was disclosed for unstated reasons after a long period of time not being disclosed. How many other cases exist in which crucial evidence was never disclosed? Since the dominant political goal is to convict more men regardless of whether or not they're guilty and to presume men guilty from the start (both those things are being vociferously demanded and openly adopted as policy, so there's no rational reason for pretending they're not) there are doubtless more cases of this sort. What makes these cases odd isn't that the key defence evidence is not being disclosed for months while the victim's life is ruined. What makes these cases odd is that the key defence evidence is disclosed at all despite the huge political pressure to conceal it.
 
While it is the daily mail, it is also the barrister involved in the defence.

http://dailym.ai/2DzJxeK

This behaviour must be changed, the presumption of innocence must be brought back for defendents, and a position of neutrality returned to the police.
 
according to the barrister he shouldn't have even been charged based on the texts let alone get as far as going to court

This was my point all along, if I was a cop investigating the claim before I went ahead to charge a suspect I'd want to check his story against hers. There is no way he wasn't saying in the first interview that she was texting him to ask to have sex after each one of these supposed rapes, that means my first stop would be checking her texts around those dates. This doesn't even need to get to a forensic investigator, I'd get the necessary permission to get the phone and check it directly off the phone and then pass it on, maybe there is a procedural thing where you have to give it to the forensics guy but again still a cursory glance at the texts on the dates in question can be passed on and major questions about her story immediately coming up. Based off those texts I'd be checking the people she was bragging with then eventually bringing her in to question her about those texts.

This is stuff that should happen before you decide to prosecute someone for rape. It's absurd that with plain as day evidence that these things aren't found in the initial investigative stage which any half competent cop would immediately question her account of events.
 
I suspect that, especially more recently. A Username is an after thought.

After trying to create a new account only to find that, for the 15th time, the name you have chosen is rejected because it has already been taken. (And especially if it is a crap website that requires you to go right back to the start and fill in all the other information all over again before resubmitting with a new username) People will just resort to picking something silly and off the wall.


For me drunkenmaster is because I'm a Jackie Chan fan, nothing more or less, I don't even drink any more as it triggers migraines. It was a nickname I started using in games as a kid because I was obsessed with the films and you had to pick something. But as you mention I can't even use this name on 99% of places I try to create an account as the username is long since gone. Anyone taking a username to be a literal description of who they are is beyond crazy.
 
‘From Liam’s arrest we’d been told there were no messages between Liam and the complainant and the material from her phone was just personal “girlie chat” which was not relevant and therefore couldn’t be disclosed to us.

‘All the police had, I was told, was one page of Snapchat messages which were utterly innocuous, so of no value to anyone at all.’

This is rather damning, it points directly to the fact that the messages were reviewed but the guy reviewing them was utterly incompetent. Unless you've read through them all you can't possibly claim that they aren't relevant. They lied about the messages they had and only when forced to give over the whole lot did his lawyer reading through them find the evidence required.

Ultimately it took the lawyer less than one evening to find the evidence from a 2500 page pdf of the texts but this was 2 years after he was bailed. Before charging someone for rape it's insane that no one would have read through that information and found those texts. It doesn't matter if it takes a day or a week, you can't just go meh, who cares about the evidence, lets destroy this guys life and maybe we'll look at it later. But again the problem is that the defence was flat out told there was no relevant messages. The police lied about the content of those texts, either they lied because they thought it harmed the case and hoped to never release that evidence or they lied because they couldn't be bothered to read through the texts and frankly neither is worse than the other, being willing to charge a guy before bothering to check available evidence isn't not in any way acceptable. But in reality if one lawyer finds this overnight when on the other end you have the forensic investigator(at minimum one, but maybe more) at least one investigating office(but could easily be 2 or more on the case) and at least one person from the CPS (though again is likely more than one person) and they all failed to check on the messages for 2 years while the guys life is torn apart. Despicable.

The guy who did 4.5 years in jail because they didn't find messages that made his story true and her's clearly a lie, unforgivable. Even now regardless of being innocent, he has spent 4.5 years in jail, there will be people who don't believe he's innocent and unfortunately he can't escape from the fact that he's done time and that will absolutely change you. You hope to hell nothing happened to him inside but people will always be wary of someone who did almost 5 years in jail for being messed up from that. He deserves a huge payout in damages.
 
Honestly, if I was falsely accused I would probably top myself if I got sent to jail for something I didnt do.

That guy has had 4 and a half years of his life taken away from him that he can never get back. That will have financial, emotional, psychological repercussions for all his life. Yet she doesnt even get to be named?

IMHO she should be sent away for the same time he served.

As a secondary query does the falsely accused chap have any come back through the civil courts? I know in America this kind of thing often ends in litigation but the UK system is much more a purely damages based system where proof of loss is required. Do we often see people sue for damages after being falsely accused of something like this?

Maybe more likely with celebs where defamation is tangible maybe.
 
As a secondary query does the falsely accused chap have any come back through the civil courts? I know in America this kind of thing often ends in litigation but the UK system is much more a purely damages based system where proof of loss is required. Do we often see people sue for damages after being falsely accused of something like this?

Maybe more likely with celebs where defamation is tangible maybe.

I believe compensation for wrongful imprisonment in the UK is actually pretty limited. And unless the rules have changed recently, i am pretty sure that you even get a deduction to take account of the free board and lodging that you have received whilst living at one of her Majesties fine residential hotels...
 
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