Mr G. Sinclair,
SCCRC,
Portland House,
17 Renfield Street,
Glasgow,
G2 5AH.
An open letter to Gerald Sinclair, Chief Executive of SCCRC
Dear Mr Sinclair,
I write in response to your Statement of Reasons received on 3 April 2019. This was the fourth time I have made a submission to SCCRC and apparently that condemns me to the Persistent and Repeated Applications Register, a seemingly “pests register”. Each application was made in good faith in an attempt to argue the points you made previously. I believe each application added something more to the previous one and offered new grounds for appeal. The third application was on the grounds that the complainer was neither credible or reliable and the last one was a defective defence/misleading behaviour of the prosecution. These are not the same grounds even though they rely on the same evidence but with a different perspective.
With each refusal you refer to the evidence as being “wholly unrelated to the critical issues concerning proof of the rape”. The” proof of the rape” is wholly related to the credibility of the complainer, she is the sole source of the evidence presented to the court (including that of the corroborating witness). In “he said, she said” cases such as this, credibility is key and that was the basis for the appeal. You have consistently ignored the evidence, we have presented, that at the appeal she was lying. This can easily be confirmed with a transcript of the appeal hearing or by simply comparing the opinion of the Court and the Facebook evidence which, had it been properly examined would be obvious. If as you claim that her lies were not related to the critical issue, why then did Lord Turnbull request an explanation for them and why did the entire appeal hearing revolve around her cross examination on the affidavit. With our first application we provided you with the entire dossier of evidence which has in subsequent applications been edited to provide the most relevant posts. The question asked by the prosecution became relevant as soon as it was posed, and her answer became evidence that the jury could consider in their deliberations. To say that had the jury been shown that she had told lies in her evidence it would have made no difference is completely disingenuous as is the claim by the prosecution that she could have explained them away. She explained away, with more lies, only those posts presented at the appeal, which the defence should have been able to counter, and the prosecution should have been aware that she was not telling the truth. Apparently, it is OK to lie under oath in a court of law as long as you don’t get caught out at the time. You refer to the “perceived misleading behaviour of the prosecution” as if we imagined it, we provided you with the evidence that the prosecution had the entire dossier, if they were unaware that she was not being truthful at the appeal then they are guilty of complacency and incompetence. Given that they were asked to acquire an affidavit to explain the inconsistencies between her evidence at trial and the postings, an irony apparently lost on most of those present in the hearing, then they should surely have checked her answers before the appeal hearing.
The judge’s opinion was based on her evidence at the appeal, they found her credible, they said she did not deliberately lie, and her evidence was largely true. In fact, the opposite was the case, had the defence challenged her evidence the judges would have seen that she not only misled the jury, but she was also deliberately lying to them, how then could they find her credible? You are ignoring all these questions and dismissing the evidence as irrelevant.
You have also commented that we missed the opportunity to get a judicial review of the submission in March 2018. Prior to this, when discussing a second application to SCCRC junior counsel had commented that “you can’t get a review of the SCCRC as they are effectively the review” therefore when you suggested that we did so we approached another lawyer who said that a judicial review would take too long and that we should submit another appeal. We were more or less conned into making the third application on those grounds rather than on the defective defence which was deemed impossible due to the fact that it involved the Dean. He wasn’t wrong about that.
It has become clear that you and the SCCRC Board members have no interest in miscarriages of justice, but of giving a false perception to the public of a safeguard against miscarriages of justice. Your members far from being neutral, have vested interests, including Frances McMenamin QC. She resides in the same chambers as the Advocate Depute, Sheena Fraser, who we claim helped the witness lie at the Appeal. Peter Ferguson QC resides in the same chambers as Fred Mcintosh who we claim has delivered a defective defence. And both no doubt has close connections with the Dean of Faculty. How anyone can argue that such a board is independent would be laughable if the consequences of such conflict of interest weren’t so grave. Both you and the board lack the integrity that the public would expect of such an organisation, and you receive financial gain for this lack of integrity.
It would appear that you prefer to protect an immature compulsive liar than accept that the judiciary have got it wrong. A proven incorrigible liar has made a mockery of the entire justice system. She has lied in her victim statement, under oath at the trial, under oath in her affidavit and under oath at the appeal court. If she were a witness for the defence, I suggest she would feel the full weight of the law.
In T Sheridan v HMA, Lord Bracadale quoted,
“Perjury must always be seen as a serious crime, since it strikes at the fundamental basis of our system of justice and at the integrity and accuracy of the decisions reached in courts. It follows that when perjury is established, it must be dealt with seriously for the benefit of the courts and the public generally. Everyone should be made fully aware that, when an oath is taken in a court of law to tell the truth, that is what must be done”.
( Singh v HMA 2005 SCCR 604)
Yvonne Crawford