Duke of Sussex court case: key witness statement false

[bluegreygreen]

I looked for another thread on this but didn't see one.

The story is about the case Prince Harry (and 6 others) are bringing against the Daily Mail (Associated Newspapers) for phone hacking. Back in July the claimants were told to reveal any payments that were made to witnesses in exchange for evidence; this seems more serious.

From what I can gather the main witness (Gavin Burrows) in the case was employed by the claimants' team over a couple of years to help research into the phone hacking by different organisations and to track down relevant people. He says he was asked on several occasions if he had worked for the Daily Mail and always denied it, and the first he knew of the current case was when he heard in 2023 that Baroness Lawrence had brought it based on his evidence.

Apparently Burrows wrote a statement at that time (2023) denying the claims and has now written a more detailed statement also denying the claims.

The claimants now don't want to call him as a witness (unsurprisingly) but do want to rely on (some of) his evidence as 'hearsay evidence'.
They also don't want Associated Newspapers to be allowed to call him as a witness.

Telegraph archive link
https://archive.is/YAjNq

I haven't heard before of 'hearsay evidence' being used like this - does anyone know the rules? How can it be tested?

Aye, the money was just resting in her account.

Once again, we have an early finish.
David Sherborne, representing the claimants, tells Judge Nicklin that, as with Prince Harry yesterday, he was expecting ANL lawyer Antony White to spend more time questioning Hurley.
Judge Nicklin tells the court that flexibility needs to be built in when it comes to organising a trial, and so other witnesses need to be available more readily next week.
There will be no witnesses giving evidence tomorrow.

Without wishing to sound unsympathetic, I find LH as credible as Harry and very suspicious as to why this case is being brought now.

I would also add following the line of questions from white kc , it seems to me that ANL have evidence of exactly who gave them information and are allowing the witnesses enough rope before they unveil!

@PrayForMyBum Antony White mentioned something to the effect that his summary was short because he had submitted written material ( can't find link but remembered I thought it odd). Maybe the written material detailed the sources of the other 10 examples?

My kingdom for a laugh emoji.

Agree - I opted for 'love'

Yes, I think we're going to see a lot of evidence of sources over the 9 weeks!

I think that LH has muddied her own timeline significantly and then there is this odd relationship with the "hacked off" group who she paid £350,000 but claims she wasn't involved with

I would guess there's not much of a paper trail either way, so it's coming down to probabilities, and how likely a specific piece of info was to get leaked and how quickly it was leaked.

Flight details known within a couple of hours of being booked, for example, a lot more dodgy than coming out a few weeks later when H - or whoever - had told vacuum friends they were going on holiday to X on such a day/ first week of June etc

I think in trials such as this that the important evidence is the written submissions with the oral evidence an opportunity to clarify issues

I think so too!

@BemusedAmerican I think it was a written opening statement he had provided to the judge, which meant he didn't see the point in going through it all again verbally?

I think it is interesting that the ANL side is effectively sitting back and letting the claimants damn themselves. The weight is on the claimants to prove illegal newsgathering, not on ANL to prove they didn't use such techniques. So I guess they just have to....wait. And for their own journalists to explain how each story was sourced.

Not completely up to date with the thread yet (only to about lunchtime) but I’m staggered that the angle both Harry and Liz Hurley are taking is basically “yeah I wasn’t really interested at the time, I didn’t pay attention, I didn’t follow the Leveson inquiry, I didn’t wonder how the information was gathered” etc. I get that they have to say this in order to make their timeline make sense but it doesn’t make any sense - now for them to be talking about how much this ruined their lives and how outraged they are and how it’s impossible for the information to have been gathered any other way than unlawfully. It’s just completely contradictory. If it was such a big deal to you would have been outraged at the time and immediately assumed something untoward was happening, particularly when there was so much about hacking in the news. They’re making themselves sound stupid.

I think, though, at least some of the claimants (Harry!) aren't clear in their mind between leaking and unlawful information gathering.
There's also a difference between careless and deliberate leaking.

To take your example of flight details: a journalist may have a source at an airport or in an office who regularly tips them off about interesting activity - reprehensible perhaps, but not UIG.

You just saved me typing that, jeff, and Liz's assertion that "I've never seen any of this before" seemed especially risky if itt's not true

With both so far it seems to come down to I wasn't interested in this / we didn't talk about that / I didn't think about it, so I guess they'd better hope that ANL don't have evidence to the contrary

And many thanks for that piece at 14:17, @PrayForMyBum. I've no idea how reliable ChatGPT is, but on the face of things it seemed to answer a lot of questions

Really? Wow. I hadn't considered that to be a possibility.
I assumed that if there were identified sources for the information in the specified articles, this would have been included in the written submissions and therfore known to all parties? And as such, those sources (if named individuals) would need to be cross examined?
I understood the defence's task to be to demonstrate how the balance of probability was not in the litigants' favour by showing alternative possibilties? Not definitive proof of sources?

I have no legal knowledge at all, so would be very happy to be corrected and have explained to me what disclosing their sources might look like in the course of the trial.

Thank you @bluegreygreen, appreciate the updates

I don’t think the horsey lot would have spilled the beans but there are always bar staff/cleaners etc

I don't like the insinuation that only the 'staff' would leak. There are many reasons why someone might choose to let slip, not least monetary.

I may be wrong but although it’s unlikely that ANL will publicly release actual names of sources, I think they might privately disclose them to the judge?

Someone said upthread that reporters keep notebooks, as police officers do, with details of stories for future reference. I'd assume nowadays it's also carefully filed on laptops.

One of the news articles mentioned about 460 pages of defence submissions. I'm assuming that will include witness statements from reporters (AW KC said there were many) detailing where they got their information.

I don't think they would have to identify sources any further than is needed to show they weren't engaging in unlawful activity (e.g. for this story, my notes show that ... I was in the room at X hotel when this conversation happened; I heard from person X (a friend) that this might be happening and made this follow up phone call to check; I had a tip-off from person Y (a member of staff at Z club)).

Final summary from today

Hurley's witness statement

• In her witness statement, Hurley said the allegation that her home landlines had been tapped had left her "devastated", and described it as a "brutal invasion of privacy";
• Listing her allegations, she wrote: "The Mail's unlawful acts against me involve landline tapping my phones and recording my live telephone conversations, placing surreptitious mics on my home windows, stealing my medical information when I was pregnant with Damian and other monstrous, staggering things";
• "I believe that we should all be free to live with the expectation that what is private is private," she wrote. "People should feel comfortable in their own homes, feel free to say personal things to their mother, family and friends, without those conversations being illegally taped and broadcast to the world by a national newspaper";
• She said the case was about "accountability to me and protecting the private walls of my home".

What has ANL said?

• In ANL's written submissions, White said the allegations of unlawful information gathering by the publisher's journalists, "including of phone hacking and phone tapping, in connection with Ms Hurley or her 10 named associates", are "unsupported by the evidence before the court";
• The allegations are "entirely baseless", he said, and "borne of an attempt by members of the claimants' research team, adopted by Ms Hurley and her legal representatives, to present a case of UIG (unlawful information gathering) against Associated based entirely on spurious and, or, discredited information";
• In his opening statement in court, White described the claims as "threadbare", and says journalists have a "compelling" account of legitimate sourcing of the articles in question;
• ANL also argues the claims have been brought too late.

But can you see that suiting Harry, jeff?

I can hear the howls of "establishment stitch-up" already

I wonder if she took the 350k pounds off her taxes as a deduction.

Did LH actually see microphones? Or was she told about them based on the dodgy Gavin Burrows dossier that he said he didn't write?