2000 Appeal (Cont)

The Judgement describes Eddies actions after he arrived home from work. Eddie told the police that he found the suicide letter and went to his parents house for help. The Judgement relies on evidence from witnesses who alleged that they saw Eddie in various locations at a time when Eddie was saying he was at his parents. The witnesses that made these allegations were discredited at trial and can be proven to be wrong.

The Judgement creates a cloud of suspicion with regard to the keys for the garage in which Paula was found. Again this issue has been completely misunderstood and has been twisted to suit the Crowns case.

They completely ignore the mysterious appearance of the so called practice rope found by a detective in the garage drawer after the drawer had been previously searched by a specialist police search team. Maybe this issue was too difficult for the Judges to deal with.

As the Appeal Court did at the previous appeal in 1995 the Judgement refers to hearsay evidence from three of Paulas friends. The three friends told the police that Paula had said that Eddie had her writing suicide notes for a supposed course at his work connected with suicide. This evidence has never been tested. A lot of Paulas friends and family came forward over that weekend and told the police the most bizarre stories. These stories were either proved wrong or a misrepresentation of the facts or proved at trial to be lies.

The Judgement states that in a report from Mr Ide, dated in June 1998, he was inconclusive as regards murder or suicide and the evidence he saw at that time indicated to him slightly more to support murder. Seemingly, the Appeal Court Judges took no account that Mr Ide apparently conducted a series of tests after making this statement in his report.

The Judgement concludes that Paula was a compliant victim in her own death and died at the hands of her husband. The mechanics as to how she died are irrelevant. The Judgement concludes that the Jury would not have been persuaded if they had heard the experts say that she went up the ladder at her husbands request and was persuaded by her husband to put a rope around her neck and then persuaded to gently lean off the ladder or gently slump downwards.

In this case common sense seems to have gone out of the window. You would think that educated people would be able to see the flaws in the Crowns case.

The question therefore, as to why Appeal Court Judges are so reluctant to overturn a verdict brought in by a Jury remains. We believe that the whole Jury system is flawed but is has been in place for decades and nobody can come up with a reliable alternative.

Juries are not always right, yet looking at the track record of the Court of Appeal in overturning convictions, Juries are seemingly right in virtually every case. If the situation arose were Juries were continually shown to be wrong, then of course the whole judicial system would fall down.

There are supposed to be safeguards built in to the system to correct mistakes. Eddie and his family have been through every procedure to correct this mistake from the Police Complaints Authority right through to the CCRC. Other than the trial and the Appeal Court, all of the government bodies, tribunals and experts that have investigated this case, have concluded that the conviction is unsafe and that there is no evidence of a crime.

Why therefore, are the Judges at the Appeal Court so hell bent on sustaining the unsustainable and upholding verdicts brought in by a Jury. There is clearly something fundamentally wrong in the whole appeal process and that needs changing.