“… if a defendant has been denied a fair trial it will almost be inevitable that the conviction will be regarded unsafe, the present case in our view constitutes an exception to the general rule”
Lord Carswell, Appeal Judgment January 2002
 

The Court cited from a House of Lords judgment in a truely lipservice fashion, as follows;

“As Lord Bingham pointed out in R v Forbes [2001] 1 All ER 686 at 697, it is always necessary to consider all the facts and the whole history of the proceedings in a particular case to judge whether a defendant's right to a fair trial has been in fringed or not.”

It is worth noting the severity of just how unfair my trial was; The Trial Judge’s tolerance of material misconduct by police officers rendered my trial grossly unfair. The judge’s tolerance is borne out by his failure to be in anyway critical of the RUC Officers involved in my case. The following are not a comprehensive list of areas where I suffered unfairness but sufficient to show the consistency of improprieties and unfairness.

• While I was being interrogated in Castlereagh I had been shown two photographs, both clearly showing the coffee jar sitting on the wall in its true position. The RUC denied that I had been shown any such photographs, falsely claiming that none existed.  During the course of the Trial there was a chance discovery of one such photo, as follows. 
• “Q376 (Defense): However, the second point that I would make is this that my instructing solicitor wrote on 3rd September 1992 to the DPP asking for copies of hand written notes and any other photographs of the device and the surrounding area which had not already been disclosed, and my instructing solicitor was told on the 15th September 1992, and that was by the assistant director of the Department of the Public Prosecutions, that the assistant director had been informed by the officer in charge of the case that there were no further photographs of the device. Consequently, we were acting on that and apparently it came to light that there were other photographs apparently different to what the DPP had said when asked for these and I got these this morning. Those are the two letters to which I am referring.”

• The Trial Judge made no criticism of this failed attempt at concealing photographic evidence, and which only came to light during the course of the Trial. Corporal Blacklock retracted his testimony on being shown the newly discovered photograph and Private Boyce refused to say where the jar was unless he was allowed to see the photograph first

• Officer Montgomery (arresting officer) asked for the Judge's permission to read out to the court the notes he had made at the time of the incident. On inspection by defense counsel, it was discovered that none of Officer Montgomery's evidence was entered in his book as he had indicated. The Trial Judge made no criticism of this deceptive attempt by Officer Montgomery.

• The case against me was effectively reduced to that of the word of the soldiers on one hand against mine on the other. Under that circumstance it specifically was not fair of the Trial Judge to only consider the soldiers good character and not mine. I was of previous good character and unknown to police at the time of my arrest and so was entitled to a good character direction.

• The trial judge being critical of the soldiers evidence stated that his “main criticism” of my defense required him to draw an adverse inference against me under Article 3.  Article 3 being a mechanism to foil an accused person from remaining silent during police interviews then presenting an ‘ambush defense’ at trial. I had been co-operative both making and signing my statements and later presented no ‘ambush defense’ at my trial. He was not legally entitled to resort to Article 3 of the Criminal Evidence Order (NI) 1988 under those circumstances.

• All mention about another man being present at the scene of my arrest had been edited out of the RUC interrogation notes. The Trial Judge accepted that the syntax of the interrogation notes revealed that they had been badly edited making them unreliable, and he reflected that in his judgment when he states, "assuming he did mention it"... ...” and that he did not say at best until 7th June that there was another person present at the scene at the time of the alleged offence.”  

• Having been persuaded that the RUC had re-edited interrogation notes the Trial Judge was still not inclined to think that this warranted any criticism.

As a final comment regarding the unfairness of my trial it is now known that two Crown forensic experts gave false testimony, for which it can be presumed, that the trial judge had no idea that he was being mislead by them.

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