Sun retrial: complaints over ‘removal’ of judge branded ‘absurd’
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Version 0 of 1. Suggestions that a judge had been “removed” from a retrial of Sun journalists because of a disagreement with his “elders and betters” has been dismissed as “absurd” by a senior high court judge. Mr Justice Sweeney, who presides over the south-eastern court circuit, told barristers representing four Sun journalists on Friday morning that they had “significantly misconstrued” an email from the original judge. He described it as a “sad day” when it is suggested that a judge may have been moved from a case because he was considered too lenient. At a hearing at the Old Bailey, Sweeney said the decision to replace Judge Marks with Judge Wide was an “administrative judicial decision” and had nothing to do with either of their views of the law or the defendants. Facing retrial are the Sun’s head of news Chris Pharo, the paper’s former managing editor Graham Dudman, Thames Valley district reporter Jamie Pyatt and the paper’s former deputy news editor Ben O’Driscoll. They have all pleaded not guilty to charges over allegations of unlawful payments to public officials for stories. In the email, Marks had informed defence barristers that he would no longer be presiding over the retrial in September and that the decision had been taken by his “elders and betters”. Nigel Rumfitt, QC, for Pharo, had said in a hearing last Friday that this remark had “caused very considerable consternation” and had given rise to “the impression that his honour Judge Marks has been taken off this against his will”. Sweeney said he had spoken to Marks, who said his remarks had intended to be “light-hearted and had been significantly misconstrued”. Marks had said at the end of the original trial last month that the retrial “will have to be before me, subject to making enquiries, if would be preferable if I was to deal with it”. In his ruling, Sweeney said “Judge Marks was, rightly, acknowledging that, ultimately, his deployment is not a matter for him” but for the “Recorder of London” acting in conjunction with Mr Justice Saunders, the judge who presided over the Rebekah Brooks hacking trial and is currently presiding over the trial of four other senior Sun journalists at the Old Bailey. Sweeney said he took “full responsibility for the decision, which I approved at the time” that Wide would take the case. He said it had nothing to do with Marks’ ruling during the original trial on the “mental element required to be proved in relation to offences of conspiracy to commit misconduct”. It was a “sad day when it is suggested that there was a real possibility that a judge exercising a judicial function had deliberately taken or approved an administrative decision to inappropriately favour one side over the other in litigation of any type”. Sweeney added: “I wish to state, emphatically, that Judge Wide was not chosen, or approved, because of his view to date on the mental element issue.” He noted that counsel for the defendants had inferred that other judges (including Wide) take a different view of the law, “less favourable to the defence” and that this was the reasoning behind the removal of Marks. “All these submissions are misconceived,” he said. “The decision to allocate Judge Wide to the retrial was not taken ‘in secret’ in the pejorative sense in which that was advanced,” he said. He said Marks was already committed to three more trials in relation to Operation Elveden, the police investigation into alleged illegal payments by newspapers for stories and if the retrial had been allocated to him, he would have had 22 or more weeks of such cases during the year. This would have prevented him being deployed on other serious cases. Mr Justice Sweeney’s ruling on Sun retrial judge switch |