To think this is an insane verdict

[DancingNotDrowning]

pilot who takes lost girl back to his hotel not guilty of kidnap and assault.

unbelievable verdict, poor girl.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly2xv1yx83o.amp

The criminal justice system is about punishing criminals, it is not about safeguarding. They're very different things.

and in the same article that a 57 year old man has been arrested for being in possession of child abuse images.

Yes! I’ve been scanning through super fast to see when this would be mentioned … the jury won’t have been informed of this but he’s in custody now for possession of indecent images….. who do you believe now eh???

Yeah and they probably weren’t allowed to disclose to the jury what they’d found on his hard drive for fear of prejudicing the trial! 🙈🤷‍♀️. Because obviously haven’t a hard drive full of indecent and illegal images of kids does not mean he’d sexually assault a child 🫣🙄

They must have found that during the search for this investigation and held it back as a separate offence.
It’s a crazy story. I understand sometimes you just can’t build a strong enough case with the evidence available to avoid reasonable doubt but I don’t think any sane person thinks there was anything believable about him taking this girl back to his flat!
Utterly depressing for this girl and her family but at least in a way it wasn’t worse. If he hadn’t brought her back out of the flat who knows what could have happened.

The more of these outrageous verdicts I see, the more I think that we need to have professional juries.
In fact, I saw The Jury on channel 4, and that was enough to tell me that justice shouldn't be left to people with no experience of the system. The weight of "reasonable doubt" seems to overrule common sense.
Back to this case - disgusting man. I wouldn't spit on him if he was on fire.

The court also heard earlier in the trial that he had communicated with the girl using Google translate because her English was poor and that would've also corroborated his version that he was trying to help her.

That's interesting. So presumably there would in effect be a record of his conversation with her that didn't contradict his story?

Yep, I think in cases where they are sure, they have a plan B.
In the case I did, the judge was quite quick to go 'well I don't think the jury are going to reach a majority verdict', knowing this would prompt a re trial where the prosecution would have a greater chance of conviction as the defendant had answered 'no comment' to every question in police interviews, but then came up with a whole story in court which the prosecution didn't have the chance to investigate. 2nd time round he was found guilty as didn't have element of suprise.

The police in this case will have known this could go either way and had a back up plan

It’s cases like these that make you realise that the UK isn’t really much better than societies that used to demand a man had to witness rape or assault for it to actually be conviction worthy.

Still looking forward to this government doing something radical about violence against women and girls. By which I mean I assume they will do nothing about messes like this.

I think at this point someone in charge of the judiciary should be asking some hard questions as to why most pedophiles are getting off scott free yet people are being given lengthy prison sentences for tweets.

The last 2 paragraphs of the BBC article reports of a man of the same age, at the same court, on the same day as the verdict being arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children. He remains in custody.
Surely, the only reason for the BBC to include this in the same article is because they know it's same man.

Yes, that's what I was assuming - it's an odd thing to include otherwise.

What a disturbing case.

Because a lot of them and wider society do not care about sex offending. Really. I mean you can only go on for so long and see absolutely no improvement and listen to someone say it’s a priority. It is not.

He didn't have to prove, or even suggest, who gave her the drug. The prosecution had to prove he did.

The legal system has let down this little girl. His story is so suspect it's hard to see how the prosecution couldn't make a case against him but the jury can't convict if there isn't evidence.

It not surprising that we have so few men are convicted of rape and sex assault when the victims’ testimony is so readily dismissed by people like you.

I can't quite believe the verdict myself.
I wouldn't ever dream of taking a child from where they are, if lost, you keep them close by to where they last saw their parents, whilst alerting security.... said as a woman, usually with 2 kids with me. None of this, take them back to my house so I can look on my Ipad business.

Some people will do all kinds of mental gymnastics to justify why they can’t find a man guilty of sexual assault on the word of the victim when they would be happy to find someone guilty of murder on the basis of testimony by an eyewitness.

The utter ridiculousness of a defence that relies on well, why would he abuse the girl in the park when he had a room? As if his behaviour as a whole was in any way logical or reasonable! Why would someone abuse a child? Why would they walk off with someone else’s child in the most surveillance heavy city in the world, knowing that they’d be caught on camera? Why would they take a child to somewhere they were registered at in their own name?

He is clearly a paedophile. At the end of the BBC article it says this

On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Police arrested a 57-year-old man at Isleworth Crown Court on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.
He was taken to a police station and remains in custody.

I feel so bad for this young girl , not only whatever happened to her in these 3 hours nut also not being able to speak English and being in a foreign country. And then being cross examined, it’s absolutely awful.

I find it interesting that at the end of the article it says that a man of the exact same age as the defendant was arrested at the exact same court for possession of child abuse images. Could just be a stunning coincidence though I guess.

Which is unlikely to get him any kind of custody unlike this trial. Seriously the punishment for sex offences against children are pathetic- and there are a lot of offenders

But the way I see it that conversation could be true as he’s trying to keep her calm and compliant. It doesn’t mean a person can’t be saying such stuff while also going on to do illegal stuff to the person.

I’m just here to repeat the point made by some previous posters… and that is, to read ALL of the BBC news article right to the end.

The amount of abject stupidity on this thread is both shocking and appalling in equal measure.

Not jury I've ever sat on, or worked alongside professionally, is, by any account, the "establishment". These are men and women off the street - hardly the ruling classes.

The jury will have heard days or weeks of evidence. From experience, it's incredibility rare for a journalist to remain in court for a fraction of that. Therefore, what you see in the media is typically a few quotes from perhaps the opening day of trial. It is rarely a fulsome, or even representative, description of everything the jury heard. If anyone believes they can decide a case based solely on the media coverage, they are at best deluded.

You can't get a criminal conviction because you think something probably happened. That's how the law works, and there are good reasons for that, plenty of things people think probably happened, didn't.