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At the Old Bailey, in 1979, a defendant, Roger Moody, was acquitted of a
charge of attempted buggery on a ten-year-old boy, on the directions of
the judge, after it emerged that improper police questioning of the boy
had yielded an unsound statement by the youngster. A further charge of
indecent assault on the same boy was thrown out by the jury after only a
fifteen-minute retirement.
Both charges related to one alleged incident when the boy was sleeping on an adjacent mattress to the man during a holiday. The most important single feature of the proceedings was the testimony of the young 'victim' in court that he had not made a complaint against the man, but merely accepted the allegations as a possibility, when put to him by the police eighteen months after the 'offence', and then without a parent being present, as required by the proper procedure for questioning children of that age. other words – so the jury must have accepted – the police had got him to state that a crime with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment had been attempted, and that one carrying a maximum of ten years' prison had actually taken place, even though he eventually accepted in court that whatever he thought had touched him might have been a hand, and it might have been accidental, and it was as he was just waking up anyway. . . Interestingly, Roger Moody had freely admitted to being a paedophile and that he had a great deal of affection for the boy. The fact that, in the full knowledge of this, both judge and jury were unhesitatingly in favour of acquittal, amounts to a massive indictment of police handling of the case. (Case reported in Peace News, 6 April, 1979.) |