The deputy editor of the Sun has called on the crown prosecution service to reconsider its decision to put more journalists on trial for alleged illegal payments to public officials for tips and leaks.
Geoff Webster walked free from the Old Bailey last week following his acquittal on two charges over payments.
“Our client’s hope is that the CPS will reflect on events and reconsider its decision to pursue prosecutions against Mr Webster’s colleagues in the remaining Operation Elveden cases,” his lawyers Janes Solicitors said in a statement.
The firm said that it had tried on two separate occasions over the past two years to persuade the CPS to review its case against Webster but they persisted in charging him.
“The CPS were pointed to the inherent difficulties in prosecuting our clients for what counsel Mr Geoffrey Cox has described as a ‘lunatic’ offence: the vagueness, the disproportionality of criminal charges and the lack of any evidence that our client had the requisite knowledge to be convicted of a criminal conspiracy,” it said.
“Those representations were rejected by the CPS. Perhaps in hindsight they would take a different view,” it added.
Webster was one of three senior Sun journalists who were acquitted by a jury last Friday of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office over £100,000 in payments to an MoD official, Bettina Jordan-Barber, over eight years. A fourth journalist was acquitted of a separate charge of aiding and abetting a public official.
One charge faced by Webster related to approvals for payments requested by the paper’s chief reporter John Kay who testified that he did not reveal Jordan-Barber’s identity to anyone.
Webster told jurors he never asked journalists who their sources were. “You just wouldn’t quiz a reporter, never, not a chief reporter, on his stories. It was just not done,” he said.
Kay also said he felt all the stories, which included an exposé of suicides at the Deepcut Barracks and shortages of equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, were in the public interest.
His co-accused, Webster and the paper’s executive editor Fergus Shanahan, were acquitted of the same charge.
Webster was cleared of a second charge which was based, on the CPS’s own admission in its indictment, on an alleged payment to an “unknown” serving soldier.
The CPS is coming under pressure to reconsider the decision to go ahead with trials or retrials against 10 more journalists including rank and file reporters on the paper.
So far it has brought 24 journalists to trial with just three convictions.
