Nicked On Time

Guest Feature

Nicked On Time
An extract from Fools' Justice

By P Koupparis
31 July 1996

I met Gaston Francis on the last day of his trial. We were 'banged-up' together at around 11:00 p.m. on the ground floor of Brixton's 'A' wing (trials) after a gruelling slog through reception. Gaston was a jovial West Indian from Streatham, tall, moustachioed with close-cropped hair atop a powerful frame. He was distraught about the prospect of getting seven to fourteen years for something he had not done.
"The coppers stitched me up," he moaned. I knew how he felt.
We were both on trial at different courts and eager to let a good night's sleep relieve us of our miseries. We settled down for the night and talked casually. I was, as always, fascinated by other people's cases and could not resist questioning him about his allegation of a fit-up. He explained that his trial judge was going to sum-up the evidence the next morning and he expected to be found guilty of stabbing a police officer! That was a serious charge and he was quite right to fear for his liberty. He vehemently denied the stabbing and recounted the events leading to his arrest. I found myself laughing uncontrollably as the story unfolded. He admitted that the jury had displayed the same reaction during the trial, but that did not detract from the seriousness of the principal charge. I asked to see his case papers. He was reluctant because he thought I would be up all night laughing and keeping him awake. I told him I might be able to help, which was his cue to laugh.
"No one can help me now," he said. "Who do you think the jury will believe, a blond, blue-eyed, policeman or a black guy?
I persuaded him to hand over the papers, switched the light on and began to read while he turned over and fell asleep. He was quite right, I did spend some of the night laughing, until an alarm bell started ringing in my head.
Gaston and a friend had tried to burgle a public house in the early hours of the morning but someone had seen them and called the police. They escaped across an alley and over a wall to find themselves in the back garden of a house, the first in a long row of back to back houses. The police chased them over several garden fences until the fugitives tried to get to the road through one of the houses. They broke a kitchen window, climbed in and discovered they were trapped by a locked door. The police laid siege to the window but were held back by a barrage of kitchen utensils thrown at them, including a microwave oven. The two managed to knock the glass out of a panel above the kitchen door and squeeze through to the hall.
The police had surrounded the house, however, the occupants, a West-Indian woman and her children, had slept through the entire episode in their upstairs bedrooms. After a while, when the fugitives had failed to emerge from the front of the house, the police stormed the house, kicking their way through its front, back and kitchen doors. Their search found only the occupants who were rudely awakened by scores of policeman charging into their bedrooms for no apparent reason. With the family awake, the lights on and no sign of the intruders, the police were stumped. An initial search revealed nothing. They were about to leave when they decided to look in the attic. Several officers with torches ascended a ladder but found nothing. More officers joined them and began spreading out, standing on the solid support offered by the rafters. The space between them was filled with a thick layer of glass-fibre matting.
An officer noticed a strip of protruding insulation. When he lifted it both men were lying underneath. Incredible as it seems, they tried to make a run for it. In the scuffle that ensued, the floor collapsed and everyone in the attic fell through to the stairs below.
The incident had all but demolished the woman's house. Some of the witness statements were genuinely hilarious, but amid all this, an officer was making a serious allegation; that Gaston had stabbed him in the side as he had tried to climb through the kitchen window. A medical report supported the injury. Most importantly, the knife was an exhibit. The woman gave a statement denying it was one of her kitchen knives. The injured officer positively identified it as the one used to stab him. The prosecution's case, on first reading, appeared strong: Gaston, armed with a knife, had stabbed a police officer during the commission of a burglary. This would have been an aggravated burglary, which carries a heavy sentence in itself, if the yet more serious charge of wounding with intent had not been laid.
By that stage of my imprisonment, I had some experience of analysing criminal cases, Instinctively, I knew there was something wrong with Gaston's case. There was no forensic evidence linking the weapon to Gaston or the officer. The medical report was vague, couched in obscure terms and generalities. To me, it looked like an attempted deception under the cover of medical gobbledegook. Also, there were too many additional statements made by certain police officers who could have given all their evidence in one statement. Why did they have to spread their evidence over a lot of smaller statements, some only a few sentences long? Another point that raised my suspicion was the actual charge. The prosecution's case should have supported the far more serious indictment of attempted murder. What had caused them to hold back?
It was getting late. I knew there was something there but I did not know what. Whatever it was, I only had a few hours in which to find it. I read all the papers again. Still nothing. I removed the paper fastener from the bundle and sorted the statements into groups. I gathered all the police statements together and read them again. A lot of officers had been involved.
I tried to sort them into chronological order in relation to the events they described. This proved difficult. Police officers usually give precise times for events. Most of them had, but the additional statements were not so clear. I felt this was an important clue.
I took my writing pad and drew a time scale along the margin and made a note of the time each officer gave for the events he described. This took ages as I had to keep searching through the statements to synchronise the events. I ended up with a page full of jumbled notations. I reorganised the data on a fresh sheet to give me an overview. All the timings matched, everything made sense. I was back at square one. I had hoped to find a discrepancy in the times, but they had all given the same times, within a reasonable margin of error.
I was close to giving up. I looked over at Gaston, who was sound asleep. What could he gain by lying to me, a complete stranger, on the eve of his conviction? I could not think of any possible motive.
I went back to work. I spent some time trying to formulate the right question to ask of the evidence. Eventually, I settled on; What proved that Gaston did not stab the officer? Motive, method and opportunity were the three pillars of the prosecution's case.
I wrote down two of the three headings. I conceded motive to the prosecution. Method was easy. If Gaston had not stabbed the officer, he may have sustained the injury climbing through the broken window, hence the vague medical report. Clever liars usually stick close to the truth. I would assume the injury took place when he said it did. For opportunity, I went back to the time-chart and drew two lines horizontally across the page. These defined the window of opportunity for the stabbing.
I was still no nearer the truth. It all held together. I decided to draw a map. It did not help me immediately but it was to become crucial later. As a last resort, I found the exhibit list and began correlating every item with the various statements associated with it. While I was doing this something struck me. The additional police statements were all made after the main statements. The exhibits were described and given identity codes in the main statements. The additional statements only referred to the exhibits by code numbers. I thought I was getting close.
I made a note of the codes against each statement's entry on the time-chart. This took a little while. When they were all listed, I looked through the Index to Exhibits and wrote on the time sheet what actual item each code stood for. I got as far as the alleged weapon, the knife. I looked at the time-chart and the answer was staring back at me! I dug out the map and placed an 'X' on it. The case against Gaston had collapsed!
I searched through the pile of police statements and pulled out the culprits. I lay back on the bed and let a wave of laughter wash over me. Gaston turned over, mumbled something and went back to sleep. I felt sorely tempted to wake him but he had a long day ahead. I let him sleep.
It was already light outside. On a fresh page, with my best pen, I began to write a Brief for Counsel. When I had finished, the letter filled one page, exactly. And no mistakes! I was well practised in that department. I signed, dated and placed it in an envelope addressed to Counsel along with the map, time-chart and the rogue statements. In a larger hand and clearer prose, I wrote a set of instructions for Gaston. As I finished, I could hear the wing coming to life. Within fifteen minutes we would be in the discharge pipeline. I woke Gaston, just as our door opened.
"Come on lads, you're both in court today. Report to the gate in ten minutes," an officer chanted.
Gaston was not an early riser. I had great difficulty gaining his attention. I did not want to raise his hopes unduly, it would have been irresponsible of me to do so, but I had to impress upon him the importance of carrying out my instructions to the letter if he was to stand any chance of a just verdict. Frankly, he was so sceptical and unappreciative that I began to regret losing a night's sleep at such a crucial time in my own trial. Anyway, I managed to stay with him through most of the discharge process and repeated everything over and over again. In the end I made him promise to trust me and give it a try. After all, he had very little to lose and everything to gain.
I managed to get some sleep on the coach that morning, a long nap during the mid-day recess and another on the journey back. I looked for Gaston in the melee waiting to negotiate Brixton's reception labyrinth. He was not there. As the evening wore on, I was shunted further along the conveyor and gave up any hope of seeing him again. As a convicted prisoner, he would return to Brixton's 'C' wing for a few days before transfer to Wandsworth. He had already pleaded guilty to criminal damage. Remand prisoners were segregated from convicts at Brixton so, unless sentence was deferred for reports, I would not see him again. Unless we met that night in reception.
By 10:00 p.m. I was second or third in line to go through for processing when I heard a shout. Gaston was running towards me along the corridor. Suddenly, I felt very scared. What if I was wrong and the judge had whacked him with a huge sentence? He would kill me! He kept coming. I could not see whether he was angry or not. A few hundred prisoners were milling around with only a handful of officers on this side of reception. People had noticed the commotion and were jumping out of his way. The officers were moving towards the panic buttons and reaching for their whistles.
Gaston stopped just in time, grabbed me in a bear-hug and spun me around and around. I was off the ground. When he put me down I realised he was jumping for joy.
He kept saying, "I could kiss you. I could kiss you!"
A crowd gathered and Gaston explained what I had done. "This guy, he got me off. I can't believe it, he got me off!"
People I did not know were patting me on the back. An officer winked at me. I asked Gaston what had happened?
"Well, I did exactly what you said," he began excitedly, "just after the Judge came in and sat down, I stood up and said, 'excuse me your honour, I've got an application to make regarding new evidence.' I held the letter up so the jury could see it. Then I said, 'Can I give this to my barrister?' My brief came over and I gave him the letter. He stood there in front of the jury reading it to himself then he asked to see the judge in his chambers. The court was adjourned and I was taken down to the cells. I was sweating my balls off. About an hour later, I was brought back up and the judge spoke to the jury.
"He told them there had been a development in the case concerning evidence police officers had already given. In order to spare them the embarrassment of having to give evidence again, he was directing them to return a verdict of not guilty. I couldn't believe what was happening. I tell you, I was over the moon. The prosecution was gutted, you should have seen their faces. Then he sentenced me and my mate to 23 months for criminal damage and that was that. I got a result. I'll be out in a year with a bit of jam roll!"
Jam roll was rhyming slang for parole.
I was called through just as he finished his account. It was another hour before I was able to lie down for the night. I was exhausted but ecstatic. Before I fell asleep I reviewed Gaston's case. How could the average man in the street be expected to find such a well hidden falsehood when, apparently, the solicitors and Counsel acting for the prosecution and both defendants had missed it? And so had the judge, the final arbiter of Justice!
Of one thing I was certain, the police had knowingly put him in the frame, probably in collusion with the Crown Prosecution Service. Fate had chosen me, an allegedly insane terrorist, to reveal the truth at the eleventh hour.
The flaw in the prosecution's case was so subtle, it seemed trivial in retrospect. The whole issue revolved around the knife. Using the times given by a dozen police officers, it was possible to accurately define when the siege of the kitchen window had taken place. Hidden behind a code number in an officer's third additional statement was the startling revelation that he had found the knife in the alley twenty minutes before the siege had started!
I slept well that night.
It had taken me only a few hours to destroy the prosecution's case against Gaston, using a simple, methodical approach. Imagine what I had been able to do to the case against me, which I had worked on for two years while on remand? And I had a lot more material to work with, over five hundred witness statements and at least a thousand exhibits! But that's another story...

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