Day 307 - 27 Nov 96 - Page 63
1 those being distributed?" He said: "No" -- he just saw the
2 piles sitting there. Then he said that he saw an identical
3 copy in the lady's hands.
4
5 On the next page, I asked him whether or not he knew
6 whether they were members of the legal profession or
7 journalists. He did not actually know whether or not -- he
8 said that he thought they were American tourists, but he
9 did not know that they were. His only basis for saying
10 that was because of the way they were dressed.
11
12 MR JUSTICE BELL: Not difficult to spot, are they?
13
14 MS. STEEL: Well, you can say that, in theory; but in practice
15 you can get it wrong, because not everybody does dress in
16 the same way. Even if they were dressed like American
17 tourists, they could have been American journalists. As
18 Mr. Morris pointed out, Mr. Rampton read out the fact sheet
19 at the beginning of the case and, by reading it out in
20 court -- well, in any event, the press are entitled to
21 reprint the subject matter of the litigation in the course
22 of reporting what is going on in court, so the press would
23 be entitled to have copies of the fact sheet for that
24 purpose.
25
26 The fact is, there is no evidence about who these people
27 were, whether or not they were journalists, lawyers, or
28 whatever. There is no evidence that they got the copy from
29 the pile behind us. There is no evidence that the pile
30 behind us was anything to do with us. In fact, there is no
31 evidence that this so-called pile of leaflets or A4
32 photocopies that were behind us was, in fact, a pile of
33 fact sheets, because, as I put to the witness on
34 page 65: "You do not have any evidence, do you, that the
35 pile of papers which you saw with a copy of what you say
36 was the fact sheet on top, was actually a pile of fact
37 sheets, as opposed to a pile of papers with the fact sheet
38 on top?" He said: "No, I have no concrete evidence but
39 I assumed, because it was a neat little pile, that they
40 were all the same and they were all the same thickness of
41 documents going down, that it was the fact sheet."
42
43 The point is that he is assuming it is a pile of fact
44 sheets.
45
46 Now, as I said, there were lawyers sitting behind us,
47 giving us advice. They had legal papers there which would
48 have included copies of the fact sheet, so that they could
49 give us legal advice and, you know, prompt us for things to
50 say during the course of both the opening speeches and the
51 start of the evidence. It would have been nice if they had
52 still been here throughout the trial but, unfortunately,
53 they have not been.
54
55 He did confirm, at page 65, line 48, that he had just
56 assumed that they were copies of the fact sheet.
57
58 I would say that there is absolutely no basis for that
59 assumption or no basis for being able to say that the
60 balance of probabilities was that they were copies of the
