The Defence Brief

Legal research can be dull but the main facts are right there on the net for journos to see The Daily Fail Heil er I mean Mail today reports on two awful Albanians who tricked the Supreme Court into letting them stay in the UK despite their having lied to the wonderful, faultless British Government by claiming they were from Kosovo. They report that “Dinjan Hysaj and Agron Bakijasi pretended to be victims of ethnic cleansing when they came to the UK in the 1990s, but were ordered to leave the country when their lies were exposed.” Lawyers for the pair wracked up bills of “£1million in legal aid” (yeah right – in fact the Supreme Court ordered a detailed assessment of costs and no figure was quoted in the case but in any event a cool mil sounds unlikely to me) fighting deportation by arguing that lying about nationality was not enough to remove British citizenship… oh did we forget to mention that they are British citizens and the case is really about whether they should be...

Tramadol tablets Big news in the UK today is the case of Laura Plummer, a 33 year old British woman who managed to “accidentally” plead guilty to importing Tramadol painkiller tablets into Egypt in a bizarre misunderstanding on Christmas Day. She has now been sentenced to three years imprisonment by the court. In Egypt it seems that the possession and importation of Tramadol is banned without a special prescription because it is widely abused in that country. Ms Plummer has said that she did not know the medication was illegal in Egypt and had taken it into the country for her Egyptian boyfriend, Omar Caboo, who is also 33 years old. According to the news reports I’ve read of Ms Plummer’s account and those given by her family to explain her actions, Ms Plummer obtained the drugs from a friend here in the UK. It is unclear whether that friend was in possession of a prescription nor, if they were, how it came to be that they built up such an extensive stockpile if they genuinely...

Serious questions for police following Liam Allen acquittal The Times front page carries a startling report today of a rape trial that ended in acquittal of the defendant, Liam Allan, on the second day of trial after the police revealed a cache of messages obtained by them from the complainant’s telephone that they had decided to withhold from both the prosecutor and the defence. It seems that in Mr Allan’s case the police had seized the complainant’s mobile telephone as evidence and interrogated it to obtain all messages contained therein. What happened next is unclear, the least damaging (to the police officers involved) theory is that they simply did not bother to read the messages. I’ll leave you to work out other possibilities. On day one of the trial, the complainant (who is still entitled to anonymity despite the prosecution being so sure that her allegations were entirely fabricated that they felt compelled to offer no evidence against the defendant) gave evidence ...