Lord Chancellor's Department. 93c Venner Road,
Sydenham,
London SE26 5HU.
0181 659 7713
May 15, 1997
Dear Sir,
I am writing to complain about the conduct of His Honour Judge
Watts during my recent trial at Southwark Crown Court. From April
22nd to May 1st I stood trial on two charges: making a threat to
kill with intent, and intimidation. A third charge, assault occa-
sioning actual bodily harm, was not proceeded with following the
judge's direction to the prosecution. I would have preferred the
prosecution to proceed with this charge because it would have
illustrated even further the malice of this prosecution, but
Judge Watts said the prosecution would be faced with insuperable
difficulties on account of this "assault" having been effected by
a letter which a police officer showed to the so-called victim!
Prior to the jury being sworn in I dismissed my barrister and
conducted my own defence. The judge advised against this, as well
he might, but obviously my decision was the correct one or I
wouldn't be here to write this letter. This was no rush decision
either; I informed my solicitor some time prior to the trial that
I would be conducting my own defence and he had informed the
court well in advance.
During the course of the trial, Judge Watts claimed repeatedly
that he was allowing me to "get away with" things that a
barrister wouldn't, simply because I was acting in person and the
court had to bend over backwards to give me a fair hearing. That
was what he claimed, however it is not what he did.
Throughout the trial he severely restricted my cross-examination
of witnesses, not simply to credit but in a wider sense. After I
had cross-examined the investigating officer for some two hours
Judge Watts said he would restrict me to another twenty minutes
after which he would order the cross-examination to be terminated
and if I had any objections I could take them up on appeal. He
assumed all the way through that I would be convicted. This
curtailment was most unreasonable because this was a complex
case. The investigating officer had arrested me before and I
wanted to prove malice on his part. There was also the salient
fact that in the first instance he hadn't charged me with making
a threat to kill but with two counts of witness intimidation. The
prosecution claimed these were holding charges but the important
point I wasn't allowed to make - except in my closing speech - is
that the arresting officer had not taken the threat to kill at
face value but had accused me of making it to intimidate a so-
called witness. In fact, at the material time this woman was not
a witness. Not against me.
Judge Watts consistently took the prosecution's side and stressed
both during the course of the trial and during his summing up
that the prosecution relied on a number of passages in a document
that I had sent to a police officer, ignoring the fact that I
relied for my defence on the entire text of the document, out of
which my unfortunate phrases had been taken, and the wider con-
text of my, at times shocking, literary style.
He seemed not to be aware of the fact that the prosecution had
claimed that I had "stalked" the so-called victim. In this docu-
ment, I had made a number of claims about the so-called victim
which the prosecution dismissed as lies or fantasy. The point
being that if I had made all this up, this would have been prima
facie evidence of mens rea, ie intent. But if I were telling the
truth then the threat to kill could be taken as an unfortunate
figure of speech, as indeed it was.
I could say much more about the conduct of the trial but I would
prefer to focus on Judge Watts' summing up, which was disgrace-
ful. The jury were out for nearly seven hours before returning
not guilty verdicts on both counts, but during that time they
asked two questions, and we were recalled. On one of these occa-
sions I told Judge Watts that he had made eight material errors
in his summing up. He replied that if they were errors of law I
should save them for the Court of Appeal, but if they were errors
of fact I should tell him what they were. I did, and he ignored
every single one.
In his summing up, Judge Watts referred to an interview under
caution that I had had with the so-called victim. He said that
nobody had made a complaint about the tone of this interview and
that my solicitor - who was present - had not come forward to
support my version of events. This is simply not true.
I referred to the tone of the interview and her offensive remarks
in an affidavit dated February 27, 1996 which I served on the
Benefits Agency (and which was put before the jury) and in a
letter to William Hague (then Secretary of State for the Dis-
abled). This letter was dated April 2, 1996. With regard to my
solicitor not coming forward to support this claim, I had wanted
him to give evidence at this trial but he advised me that it was
against legal protocol for a solicitor to give evidence for his
client, in view of the solicitor/client relationship. I actually
stated this when I was cross-examining the so-called victim, and
Judge Watts cut me off at the time.
Judge Watts stated that the so-called victim had no power to
restore or withdraw my benefit. This was what she, Rita Broadway,
had claimed. The fact remains though that my benefit was cut off
after her interrogation and it was her "evidence" which led to
this decision. And whether or not she could restore my benefit
the fact remains that she led me to believe that she could.
Of the claim I made that Rita Broadway could "fix" Gerry Gable,
Judge Watts said that how she could do this was beyond the jury's
imagination.
In this connection I can do no better than quote from the docu-
ment I delivered to the police, and which was the subject of the
threat to kill charge:
"In about her fourth phone call she told me that if I played ball
with her she could not only get my benefit restored but that she
could fix Gable for me. I asked her what she meant by fix him,
and she said that all the agencies: the Benefits Agency, Customs,
etc, worked together, and all she had to do was make a few phone
calls to have Gable subjected to an intensive audit, raids by the
VAT men, you name it."
Judge Watts ridiculed the reference to Rita Broadway's medical
history, stating that an abortion is not the same thing as a
miscarriage. Actually, the medical term for miscarriage is spon-
taneous abortion. More importantly, it was part of the prosecu-
tion case that I had obtained access to this woman's medical
records, something that I obviously could not have done.
Judge Watts said I had claimed that the trial was the result of
collusion, conspiracy and entrapment, that the arresting officer
was part of this conspiracy and that it was difficult to see how
this could be a fit-up or fabrication because the evidence came
from the defendant, that the allegations I had made against Rita
Broadway should not affect this, and that I should not be allowed
to put up a smokescreen. Again, this was a gross distortion.
The fact is that I demonstrated that the arresting officer DC
Nemeth had passed information about the August 6th raid on my
flat to Gable. They both denied this and Gable claimed, falsely,
that this information had come from a member of the British
National Party. In fact, there were only six people who knew the
details of the raid on my flat: myself, my solicitor, DC Nemeth,
DS Wall and two other police officers. This information had to
have come from one of them, and it is inconceivable to me that it
didn't come from Nemeth, especially when Nemeth subsequently
raided two people named by Gable in his witness statement, both
of whom were, surprise, surprise, in litigation with Gable.
The claim I actually made about collusion and entrapment was that
Gable was engaged in some sort of bizarre plot with Rita Broad-
way, that she had tried to lure me somewhere so that I could be
"dealt with" and that she was acting on Gable's instructions. The
allegation I made about DC Nemeth is that he had exploited my -
admittedly crassly stupidly worded - deposition to DS Wall to do
Gable's dirty work for him.
Judge Watts' claim that the allegations I made against Rita
Broadway constituted a smokescreen is an outright lie. If these
allegations were false then the jury was entitled to draw the
conclusion that I had indeed stalked this woman and that the
threat to kill had been made with intent. If on the other hand
these allegations and details about her phone calls were true,
then the jury might rightly conclude that the threat to kill was
simply hyperbole, strong language used for the sake of effect.
Fortunately the jury believed me.
Judge Watts noted that Gable denied passing any money to Rita
Broadway, as Gable would obviously have done. But what he didn't
stress was that under cross-examination Gable had claimed at
first that he had never bribed anyone in his life, then he had
admitted that at his 1992 trial he had claimed to have bribed a
man named Keith Thompson, whom he had paid nearly a thousand
pounds for "extremely valuable information" in Gable's own words.
Neither did the judge mention that Gable admitted brazenly under
cross-examination that he runs undercover agents in the British
National Party and other "hate groups" and that some of these
agents use racial abuse and incite racial hatred. All these
admissions supported my claim that Gable had bribed or colluded
with Rita Broadway.
The judge mentioned that my application for Judicial Review was
dismissed but did not mention that it was not dismissed on the
grounds that a criminal investigation was ongoing. No such in-
vestigation was ongoing, contrary to the claims of Rita Broadway
and her superior.
Judge Watts then made an absolutely disgraceful statement; he
said that the only purpose of the letter of September 13, 1996
could have been to intimidate Rita Broadway. Yet the prosecuting
barrister herself suggested an entirely different reason for my
writing this letter: spite. Spite does not constitute intimida-
tion.
The jury should not consider the truth or otherwise of the depo-
sition, he said. Again, this is plain wrong. By this Judge Watts
was as good as ordering the jury to convict me.
The final point I would like to make is that in his summing up,
Judge Watts said that DC Nemeth took the threat to kill at face
value and was immediately concerned that I would carry out this
threat. In the first instance, the intent that had to be proved
was my intent, not his belief in my intent. In the second in-
stance this is plain wrong because, as I pointed out in my clos-
ing speech and have already mentioned in this letter, DC Nemeth
did not take this as a threat to kill with intent. In the first
instance he took it - or would have had me believe that he took
it - as an attempt to intimidate a witness or potential witness.
This is clear when one reads the full transcript of the interview
at Belgravia Police Station. Not the edited transcript, the full
one. In the first instance, Nemeth charged me with two counts of
witness intimidation, one of which was later dropped. The threat
to kill charge was added later. In her closing speech, the prose-
cutor tried to claim that these were holding charges. Clearly
this is nonsense because if Nemeth had believed the threat to
kill was made with intent he could and would have brought that
charge himself. This charge was in fact brought later by the CPS.
The fact that Nemeth himself didn't bring this charge is surely
evidence that he didn't believe this threat was made with intent,
and if he didn't consider this in the first instance that fact
alone should have been enough to create a reasonable doubt in the
minds of the jurors and to lead to my acquittal. Judge Watts
failed to point this out and, in my opinion, was criminally
irresponsible for failing to do so.
As a postscript I will add that Judge Watts was obviously most
displeased with the not guilty verdict. He showed his pique by
refusing to allow me to shake hands with the jury. I would re-
spectfully suggest that his conduct be investigated because if
other defendants have suffered such partisan treatment in his
sixteen years on the bench there must be not a few innocent
people languishing in gaol due to his bias, bigotry and preju-
dice. I was extremely fortunate in having an intelligent,
thoughtful, independent-minded jury. Other defendants may not
have been so fortunate.
Yours sincerely,
A Baron