Sun deputy editor 'was prosecuted on the basis of just five words'

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/05/sun-deputy-editor-geoff-webster

Version 0 of 1.

A Sun deputy editor with 55 years of “blemish-free” living has been prosecuted on the basis of “just five words” fired off without a second thought in response to requests for payments for information, a jury heard today.

Geoff Webster, the paper’s deputy editor, has found himself in the dock at the Old Bailey because the prosecution started from the “presumption of guilty” instead of the “presumption of innocence” to which every citizen is entitled, the jury was told by his barrister.

Webster is on trial for two counts of conspiring with a public official – one known and one unknown to the Crown – to cause misconduct in public office, by approving payments requested for tip-offs and leaks to the paper.

The emails at the centre of the case were sent the paper’s chief reporter, John Kay, in relation to stories about the army including revelations that the army’s bomb squad chief was resigning and that an officer had been sacked after doing a naked conga.

Geoffrey Cox QC, for Webster, asked why would a man who had carefully constructed his career that reached deputy editorship of Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper would suddenly throw it all away.

He told them Webster had nothing to gain, not as much “as a bag of marbles” from being involved in a conspiracy as alleged by the Crown.

“He won’t even park on a yellow line, and he is knowingly supposed to have taken part in a criminal conspiracy – for what?” said Cox.

“It is not suggested he earned a penny piece for these stories.

“Why would he, for these few stories, for what? For this bag full of marbles? So that John Kay could clam an exclusive?

“He puts his neck in the noose and invites the courts to hang him?”

His client, he told jurors, was not guilty of the charges facing him.

Cox told jurors that these were exceptional emails in the life of Webster, who had a busy working day as deputy editor.

He replied to two emails with the single word “sure” and another “OK no worries” .

“There is not evidence, nor is it suggested that he had ever approved a John Kay request for payment for this or any other source before,” said Cox.

He reminded jurors that Kay had made previous requests directly to the former editor Rebekah Brooks and there was no evidence these had ever created an issue. He said if “there was any lurking mine about to explode” it would have been dealt with previous by his boss. “If there had been problems, why hadn’t it been picked up before?” he asked.

At the time of the first email, in July 2010, he was standing in as editor and “incredibly busy” because a major rolling news story about the man hunt for cop killer Raoul Moat.

“It was a rubber-stamp exercise, the money was the issue,” said Cox, not John Kay’s source. “His thoughts were not on administrative detail – and with John Kay he simply answered ‘sure’.”

Addressing the 11 jurors in his closing speech, Cox told them they had to ask themselves what Webster could have possibly known about Kay’s source in the space of the seconds he spent on the emails.

“You have to ask yourselves whether or not those five words replied to, in the circumstances in which they were, can possibly make you sure that he knew the things that he must have known in order to show he was a willing party to to a criminal conspiracy.”

“The Crown invites you to be sure, because nothing less than that will do, that a man of 55 years of age of previous entirely good character agreed to what he knew was a serious, so serious, breach of a public officer’s duty that it put him at risk of bring what the Old Bailey,” said Cox.

“This man has had no criticism or blemish against his name in 55 years,” he added.

The first charge faced by Webster is linked to payments made by the Sun to MoD official Bettina Jordan-Barber, who was described by Kay as his “number one military contact” or “ace military contact” in his payment requests.

Cox told jurors that in order for him to be found guilty, the jury would have to be sure Webster would have known who Jordan-Barber was, that she was a public official and that she was breaching her duty in such a serious manner as to constitute misconduct in public office.

This would be conceivable as each email was “answered in a few seconds with five words, in total five words sent back in a few seconds over 13 months”.

He said the prosecution’s case that it was “obvious” that the source was a public official. “We submit it is far from obvious,” he said.

One of the sources, it is now known, was no connected to the military in any way, but worked in TV.

In reference to a BBC current affairs series, Cox reminded jurors that it is now accepted that the source of the story about bomb squad chief Colonel Bob Seddon was not Jordan-Barber but the “producer of Panorama” who had run an investigation on shortages of equipment in Afghanistan.

The second count centres on the source of a photograph of an army officer, nicknamed “Colonel Lustard” who was facing the sack over an alleged affair with another officer.

“We have no idea who supplied that photo whether it was an army officer or not,” said Cox.

Webster believed it was a private photograph and that the Sun would have had the right to purchase it.

The source of the photo has never been established by the Crown.

The trial continues.