The queue to the Women’s Prison in Holloway was decidedly different. Sure, there was a consternation of mothers, but they didn’t look quite so hard, just forlorn. There were a few ‘Mrs’ I suppose, but they didn’t look quite so glamorous, and the children queued in grim and unhappy silence. This wasn’t a happy weekly visit to see their exciting Dad, no, this was a horrible reminder of their absent mother.
I was there to visit Tasha. It was her first conference with myself, Kelly and her QC, Charlie Parkman.
Charlie came with no papers and no pens – he didn’t need them. With incredible precision he spoke gently to her about her case for over an hour. Clearly every fact and detail was now in his head.
The jealousy that I had expected to feel when another, more experienced barrister came into my case had completely dissipated, giving way to a feeling of contentment and confidence: Tasha was happy and impressed and that was good enough for me.
She gave her account to Charlie in exactly the same way she had given it to me – and he listened and nodded and looked softly at her and told her that we would do all we could for her. I was happy with the use of the collective noun ‘we’, it made me feel part of everything. We were a team.
Before we parted, Charlie gave us all our tasks: Kelly and I were to deal with disclosure, track down witnesses, especially Gary Dickinson’s ex-girlfriends, draft a bad character application, and deal with the interviews.
I reacted like a tail-wagging Labrador each time Charlie gave me something new to do.
The next day I eagerly started to deal with the issue of disclosure.
If you get the chance, look up the poster for the 1994 Demi Moore and Michael Douglas ‘gripping courtroom drama’ Disclosure – tag line: ‘Sex Is Power’. It shows Demi Moore, skirt hitched up to her waist, in mid-clinch with Michael Douglas. Well, I can tell you that this does not in any shape or form reflect the reality that is disclosure.
Disclosure is not sexy, but, in every legal case, it is crucial.
Let me tell you how it works in criminal cases.
The police investigate a crime and in the course of their investigation they take statements and accumulate evidence. They then send their file to the Crown Prosecution Service who decide whether or not to prosecute. The test for the CPS is whether it is in the public interest to prosecute and whether, on the evidence, there is a realistic chance of a conviction. They are therefore not allowed to prosecute hopeless or pointless cases.
Once they’ve made their decision to charge, they carry out what is known as primary disclosure. This is when they serve on the defence all the statements and exhibits that they are relying on to prove the charge.
After primary disclosure, if the defendant is contesting the charge, he must serve something called the defence statement, which says why he is not guilty.
The prosecution then respond by serving the items of evidence that they haven’t yet disclosed, which will either assist the defence or undermine the prosecution. And that is an important test, because it relies on the integrity and intelligence of a disclosure officer.
They also serve upon the defence a list of all the statements and documents that they have which they are not relying upon, this is called the schedule of unused material, which the defence must go through carefully to see if there is anything else that, in their opinion, assists them, or undermines the prosecution’s case.
See I told you – nothing to do with sex or power or Demi Moore in a short skirt.
Now, I’ll be honest, in most of the minor cases that I do, the issue of disclosure is fairly straightforward. Most of the material is disclosed and anything that is held back is usually completely uncontroversial (for example, a statement from a police officer describing how they disposed of their protective gloves after they’d seized some drugs from the anus of a drug mule doesn’t really assist the defence or undermine the prosecution). But there have been cases when a failure to disclose has been potentially catastrophic for my clients.
Take the case of Abdul Ramzi. Abdul was the owner of a curry house in the East End. He was a family man and well-respected member of his community. Alas for Abdul, he also had a penchant for young men, particularly rough young white men, preferably with tattoos.
And after one liaison with a nineteen-year-old man from Dagenham, he was accused of rape. The complainant claimed that he had met Abdul in a gay bar. They had chatted and then shared a taxi because they were going in the same direction, before Abdul ordered the taxi to stop by some waste ground where he was alleged to have raped the young man in some bushes.
At first, Abdul denied any knowledge of the Dagenham boy – ‘This is ridiculous,’ he told me, ‘I am a married man. I am 100 per cent straight. I have never met this man.’
The one flaw in Abdul’s assertion that he had never met the man was that his DNA and sperm was all over the complainant’s underwear and body.
I met him in chambers for a conference. He was shaking as he told me how this was all a total set-up and how he was not gay.
‘That’s fine,’ I told him, ‘no one is suggesting that you are gay. But, if you want me to help you, then you are going to have to tell me everything, because the evidence in the case shows, overwhelmingly, that you have had some kind of contact with the complainant.’
After a couple of months of total denial, just before the trial, a very contrite Abdul finally made the decision to tell me everything. He told me that he had met the man in a pub, they had kissed in the pub, had some jiggy-jiggy in the pub toilets and left together in a taxi, going on to have consensual sex in a disused bus station.
This was massively important. As soon as I heard Abdul’s proper account, I knew that there was potentially evidence to corroborate his story. You see, you can’t cop off with anyone in a pub and expect it to remain a secret: CCTV is everywhere.
I scoured the schedule of unused material for reference to the CCTV footage of the pub. It was inconceivable that the police wouldn’t have seized it in a case like this. But, amazingly, there was no mention of it. Nothing, not a sausage.
I asked my solicitor to get in touch with the police and the CPS and ask them to have a look for it, and the answer came back that it didn’t exist.
I didn’t believe them.
I asked again, and got the same message back: ‘There is no further material that either undermines the prosecution case or assists the defence.’
I went before a Judge and made a big fuss. The Judge agreed that there must be something and suggested that a failure to seize the CCTV footage was a serious flaw in the investigation.
Lo and behold, a few days later I received a brown envelope containing a CCTV disc. On it, clear as day, was Abdul and a young blonde man sitting at a table in Flumes Club in Basildon, then Abdul and the young blonde man kissing in Flumes Club, then Abdul and the man disappearing to the toilets, then Abdul and the, seemingly very happy, content young man walking out of the club, hand in hand, towards a taxi.
The Crown dropped the case against him a short while later. After this, they knew that there was no longer a reasonable prospect of a conviction.
Now, in the case of Tasha Roux, the schedule of unused material ran to many pages. I scoured it. There was very little that was of interest: a few things about Gary Dickinson’s previous convictions (which were not insubstantial, but, alas, nothing for violence against women), lots of unhelpful briefings and some statements from other people in the flats who said that they hadn’t seen very much. Not surprisingly, there was nothing about any of Dickinson’s other girlfriends.
I reached the end of the schedule and sighed. I was desperate to establish something that showed that Gary Dickinson was capable of hitting women in the way that Tasha described. I knew that there must, somewhere, be an ex-girlfriend who could give evidence about Dickinson and what he was capable of. I needed at least one other girl, especially one who had never met Tasha and had no reason to just back her up. It might make the difference between a jury believing or disbelieving her account.
Tasha had been certain that there was a girl from a club in Deptford called the Purple Velvet Club, who Dickinson had been seeing behind her back. Lilly, Tasha had said.
It was time for me to find Lilly.