le Cornu, a former St. Helier deputy, lawyer on the Jersey Employment and Discrimination Tribunal and veteran voice on Jersey's left, had been charged with perverting the course of justice, with his wife accused of three alleged breaches of the Data Protection Law relating to dealings she had with a trust company (as the JEP reported as front-page news in December and several times since). Today, the 19th of July, the prosecution announced that in fact that they didn't have any evidence, and they were dropping charges. le Cornu, who has been on bail since he was charged last year, is now a free man.
However, that's not what makes the case so interesting - I wouldn't be writing about it in detail if this was a cut-and-dry case of an innocent man walking free. In his statement, the prosecuting counsel, Sam Brown, decided - despite literally admitting in the same statement that he lacked any solid evidence - made some pretty ridiculous comments saying that Nick was somehow still guilty, that he was a criminal, he had brought the prosecution on himself and should bear a larger-than-normal percentage of the legal costs of the case. This was so extraordinary, coming not from an aggrieved member of the public or a political opponent but from a trained lawyer like Mr Brown, that Assistant Magistrate Peter Harris commented on it in his summing up, as well as striking down any demand from the prosecution for le Cornu to pay any more legal costs than any other defendant would pay in any other case.
The timing of this case, politically speaking, is interesting to say the least. It's currently July, and the election - in which Mr le Cornu stood, in St. Helier No.1 - was in May. If the prosecution lacked evidence, there are two major questions that need to be answered. 1: Why did the prosecution, who by their own admission couldn't back a word they said, waste vast amounts of public money on a case that has managed to drag on for over six months, yet gone nowhere and proved nothing. 2. Why weren't the charges dropped earlier, before the election? Would it be terribly cynical of me to suggest that this was in fact a political trial, and the prosecution were less interested in Nick's alleged crimes and more in sabotaging his election bid? Why were the charges not dropped in April? Or even before that? The public needs to know what's gone on here - it seems to me that there's a serious possibility here that prosecution lawyers have pursued a political agenda, wasted valuable court time, and attempted to damage the political goals of a candidate in an election, all at the taxpayers' expense. We all know that Jersey's law enforcement and legal apparatus is heavily politicised (to the point where the head judge is the speaker of the States Assembly), that the police have never investigated real crime and that the courts are routinely used as a political weapon designed to drag individuals who challenge the status quo through the mud (just look at how Geoff Southern and Shona Pitman were treated in 2009), but the idea that this sort of underhanded shadow play could've influenced an election at the cost of Joe Taxpayer is still pretty shocking.
Independent journalist Mike Dun's interview with Deputy Monty Tadier about the case can be found below.
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