Open Letter To Lord Advocate

Dear Sir

As the most senior member of the Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal Service, I demand that you personally intervene in to a series of problems concerning your office which have now become very public at the level of the press.

For more than two years I, an innocent victim of crime, have been frustrated, and ultimately angered by the lack of help, transparency, fairness, and justice from the COPFS. This frustration and anger has caused me to go public with these matters.

I have written, and had published, yet another newspaper article in which I have been deeply critical of the COPFS (The Genn Newspaper, readership +35,000, issues 150 and and 142):

http://issuu.com/regennewspapers/docs/the_genn_issue_150 (see Page 2)

http://issuu.com/regennewspapers/docs/the_genn_issue_142 (see Page 12)

Please read both articles above. I'm sure you will agree they are not the type of headlines the COPFS should be making in the press but, because you claim to represent the public interest and rely on the public to help you prosecute cases, it is absolutely essential that the public be informed of how your office really behaves and what they can expect from the COPFS.

I will continue to hold you and the COPFS accountable in the full glare of press publicity until you take action and do the honest, just, and right thing by me. There can be nothing more serious than the loss of liberty to an innocent man and I demand accountability from all of those responsible for it.

To date, in addition to my complaint against PF Depute M Stewart, I have had to endure a catalogue of COPFS fiascos such as PF Depute Brendan Devaneys arrogant, condescending attitude and prejudice against someone with a disability and his misuse of his authority with the Police.

I have endured PF Depute Sarah McCall lying to a Sheriff (confirmed by those present) regarding witness summonses.

Then we had PF Depute Calum Forsyth's attempts to pervert justice by refusing to hand over a seized item (a mobile phone) which he knew contained proof of my innocence even though he would NOT be using it as Crown production. It's also worthy of note that Mr Forsyth only released the item when I had him ORDERED to do so by a Sheriff.

The public find it bewildering that the COPFS - who are supposed to work in the interests of the the public in pursuing truth and justice - abused their privileged position within our justice system to purposely attempt to deny a court the truth in order to secure a conviction against an innocent man.

It beggars belief.

But, as you well know, Lord Advocate, your Procurator Fiscal Deputes do this every day - after all it was YOU who instructed your Deputes in late 2013 NOT to drop any cases which may have domestic elements to them, even if there is no chance of the cases succeeding in court.

However justice doesn't work both ways at the Lord Advocates office...

Because those guidelines - which caused your Deputes to pursue a conviction against an innocent man - do NOT extend to cases involving corruption allegations against your friends and colleagues in Police Scotland and your own Crown office.

Your message to the public could not be clearer - the Crown office WILL pursue cases against members of the public even when they know them to be innocent, but will NOT pursue cases against their own colleagues and their friends in Police Scotland when they know them to be guilty.

While the public know that innocence or guilt is decided by a court, not you, the public understandably have grave concerns that you are in a very privileged position as the gatekeeper to the courts and that you are currently abusing that privilege in order to protect your friends and colleagues in Police Scotland from facing prosecution.

Let me be clear. Corruption exists in every organisation, not just in the COPFS and Police Scotland. As an example, a plumber who plumbs in a washing machine for a friend one evening after work is acting corruptly if he arrives to do the job in a company van, using company petrol, and a couple of lengths of pipe from the back of the van to complete the job.

Corruption exists in all organisations...BUT...it only exists because those in a position of authority within that organisation allow it to exist (in the example above, the plumbers boss facilitates the corruption by allowing the plumber to take a company van full of materials home with him each night).

Similarly, corruption in the COPFS exists because you, Lord Advocate, allow it to exist.

The buck stops at you.

YOU are responsible, and the Scottish public is judging YOU.

Damaging stories about COPFS and your friends at Police Scotland now surface with alarming regularity in the Scottish press. It's little wonder that public confidence in the integrity of the COPFS is at an all-time low.

By now you may be asking yourself how your Deputes have managed to allow these issues I have with your office to snowball in to such a high profile spat and be splashed all over the newspapers and internet websites?

A small part of the answer is that you simply made a serious miscalculation of me. You assumed I would be like most of the other innocent victims I have spoken to whose lives the COPFS happily and passively savaged with their vindictiveness, ignorance and incompetence.

You assumed I'd be the type of victim who would be so delighted just to be cleared in a court of law that I'd heave a sigh of relief that the nightmare was over and run away, broken, battered and too weak to hold you to account and fight you for justice.

But that's only a part of the answer.

The main reason this has gone so far is that there is a widespread culture of arrogance and self-preservation among Procurator Fiscal Deputes in the COPFS. This is the root cause of all your problems in the COPFS.

You see, we, the Scottish public, accept that society needs the Police and the COPFS. Society cannot function without you.

But society needs to have CONFIDENCE in what the Police and the COPFS do or everything falls apart, including society itself.

So when the Police and the COPFS get it wrong and are found to have pursued an innocent person and caused that person to lose their liberty, the culture of cover up in your organisation kicks in to ensure that you avail yourselves of ALL responsibility at all costs - even if this means failing the poor innocent victim you wrongly tried to prosecute. You then move on from prosecuting the innocent victim to persecuting the innocent victim.

You target the victim with aggressive vindictiveness at every turn to make him afraid to speak up against you, just so that the public may never know how you failed, messed up, and got things wrong.

You take resources - which you should be utilising for the public good - and use them to cover up your mistakes and ensure they remain hidden from public view.

Even when an innocent member of the public DOES manage to successfully sue you - which rarely happens because of the prohibitive cost of suing the police and Crown office (ordinary people just can't afford to sue you, and boy don't you know it and play on it) - you insist that they sign a confidentiality agreement to prevent the public knowing about your failings.

In your world, victims like me are considered acceptable collateral damage next to the far more important business of self preservation of the COPFS and Police Scotland.

So a process of "investigate, but do nothing" begins.

For you, as long as the public 'perception' is that you investigated fully (even though you didn't), then that's all you require to avail yourself of all blame, sweep the matter under the carpet, shut up the victim you wronged, and keep public confidence in you artificially high while continuing with business as usual.

Except that in this case I - the victim you have a responsibility to, but have chosen to fail - am exposing you in a most public way.

If you stop to think about it for a moment, the COPFS is facing much greater public scrutiny over my case today than it has ever done before. So instead of this problem fizzling out and going away (as the COPFS hoped it would) it's getting WORSE, and it's becoming bigger and more public as time goes by.

The next project in the pipeline (to accompany the Moroculous blog, BentFiscals website, and newspaper articles) is to make public my experiences with the COPFS on national television via a specialist media publicity broker. This project is rather more complex than the regular press stories that have appeared so far and as such I have been advised that for maximum impact I should wait until a, bigger, more explosive story of Police/COPFS corruption breaks and then piggy-back my story on to it. It goes without saying that my solicitor has, stored in a safe place, a copy of the video in which three Police officers can be seen and heard very clearly lying, plus he has the three statements the officers made afterwards in which they contradict what is seen in the video.

Not only will it make great television, but most importantly it will let the public make up their own minds about whether they can trust the Police and the COPFS after they've viewed it (but you already know all this anyway as you have a copy of the same video and police statements in your files and chose to ignore their crimes).

Rest assured, Lord Advocate, I will continue to pressure your office in the full glare of publicity until you act with honesty and decency and assign someone to properly and fully deal with the issues I have with everyone involved in this mess you have created.

I am reliably informed that there are a small number of employees in the COPFS who are NOT as overtly corrupt as their colleagues, but I am of the opinion that they must still share equal blame for the continuing behaviour of the COPFS. They are every bit as responsible for the continuing corruption in your office by sitting passively, doing nothing, and going with the flow. These particular employees can be found dove-tailing themselves in rather too comfortably with the COPFS culture and its day to day functions and processes. I believe these employeesy know in their hearts that things are not right in the COPFS, but they keep their head down just below the trenches, work away in the hope that a promotion will push them up the ladder a little further, and eventually they'll clock up enough years to retire with a nice pension (content in the flawed belief that they've had a life well spent, working for the public good).

I refuse to deal with the corrupt Procurator Fiscal Deputes in the COPFS any longer, nor will I deal with any of the 'go with the flow' minion Deputes who have no appetite to take the bold decisions required in this case.

I will only deal with someone in the COPFS who is honest, decent, and trustworthy - someone who will work with me to right these wrongs without fear of retribution from his or her peers and superiors in the COPFS and Police Scotland.

So, Lord Advocate, can you find me such an honest, decent, and trustworthy person in your COPFS?

Indeed, do you, Lord Advocate, have the substance, character and conviction to appoint such an honest, decent and trustworthy person from your ranks to resolve my case?

I am watching and waiting, as are the Scottish public...

Yours Sincerely

Kenneth Campbell
http://www.moroculous.co.uk