Harry Dedecker was an anonymous Highland Justice of the Peace whose faith in the system was as solid as you would expect from an establishment legal figure - until he saw it from the other side, and discovered a culture where the truths he took for granted may not have been what they seemed.

It has been 18 years since a member of the judiciary was removed from office, and even then, Sheriff Stewart had earned quite a reputation for himself, drawing criticism from the then Scottish Secretary, the Sheriff principal as well as two MPs before being ruled unfit for office.

Harry Dedecker was stripped of his duties as a Justice of the Peace in July this year after a single speeding transgression, when police said he was doing 45mph in a 30mph zone, which Dedecker believed to be factually incorrect. He declined to pay the fixed-penalty notice and instead pointed out his version of the event to the court. It was in doing so, the simple act of offering his side of the story, that he learned - as Shirley Mckie did - what can happen when you hold your ground against organs of the state.
The case proved to be a journey through the looking glass for Dedecker, who had enjoyed what he described as good relations with judiciary during his nine years on the bench, and who also never questioned the integrity of the evidence submitted to his court by the police, a faith which has now been shaken by the ease and willingness with which the officers of the law offered a version of events so utterly at odds with his own experience.

Dedecker was ultimately fined for the original speeding offence and also for not attending one of many postponed hearings, despite his writing to the court and advising them that he would in fact be out of the country on the proposed date of his hearing.
“My non appearance was well announced in advance. It was the 6th time it had called in court. There had been several delays, due to police holidays and once there was no Sheriff. A general shambles really,” he says.

Whilst Dedecker’s brush with the law was by any measure extremely minor, and his challenge to the authority of the police equally so, he was shocked at the patterns the case exposed. Although he accepted from the outset that appearing in court on a speeding matter would -even if acquitted- end his career as a JP, offering an alternative perspective to the version of events provided by the police was intended, Dedecker says, simply to protect his own honesty and reputation.

He says the police stopped him four miles along the road after trailing him with a handheld device that he could clearly see in his rearview mirror, all the way from Dingwall in a 40mph zone. The police initially said it was the driver that took the reading (whilst driving) then altered their account to say it was the passenger, he says.

“That’s what started all this off. That created doubt in my mind about the accuracy of what they were saying. I should have challenged them straight away, and that I saw them pointing their gun at me there [in the 40mph zone] but I was in a state of shock,” Dedecker says. He also observed that the police said in their submission to the court that they were driving an unmarked police car, whilst Dedecker says the car was marked.

“I felt there was some principle involved, and I thought I’ll try and do this.”

Dedecker may have had naïve faith that the truth would prevail, but as The Firm has learned through challenges to Strathclyde and Lothian and Borders police, it is , shall we say, not unknown for police statements submitted to the courts to contain omissions and elaborations supported by officers working in pairs, that differ wildly from the actual events, even in cases where the actual events have been audio or video recorded. The Tomlinson case in London and the killing of Jean Charles De Menezes also bore this reality out, indicating a degree of confidence on the part of the police that their version will survive unchallenged not only by the court, but by their own hierarchy. Dedecker was shocked not only that the police statements differed so profoundly from his own experience, but that it could be done in apparent accord with the prosecution, safe in the knowledge that the officers would be spared actually perjuring themselves.

“The Fiscal said it didn’t matter. It was what was said in court that matters,” Dedecker says.

“The statement was written by the senior officer. It is still their word against mine. They said they saw me overtaking several vehicles, and that is just an explicit lie. But they just added that to the statement. When I pointed that out to the fiscal in writing I thought they’d surely drop the case, but they didn’t.

“There is so much technology about. Convicting someone solely on what people say is not right. If they had a video or a photograph of my car doing that then no problem, but they chose not to do that. Why is that?”

Like the Tomlinson case, no action has been taken against the officers who gave the statements to the court in Harry’s case. His single view of the process from the other side of the bench has totally changed his perspective on the administration of justice, the failures of which he believes are marbled all the way through the process and embedded in the judicial culture.

“It is these closed groups. It is so unhealthy. The police have alienated themselves by their own behaviour. I always thought that if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about, but look at this,” he says. He is also concerned at the role and neutrality of the judicial communications office that issued a press release about his removal from office, which he says contained inaccuracies that were not corrected and “deliberately ignored” by the Crown Office when they were contacted by the media to follow up.

Dedecker says the judicial communications media release about his case both contained the wrong information about where he sat as a JP, and “represents a poor attempt at media management which backfired”. Dedecker argues that the integration of the JP courts under the auspices of the Sheriff Courts echoes a strident drive to systemisation of the courts and also the police that has resulted in a cultural drift that has impacted negatively on the administration of justice, and which his own experience brought into focus.

“Things can start operating a bit like a cult, its like a closed society,” he says.

“That’s what was good about having the lower court outside of the “professionals”. It was separate, and there was a lay element to it. Now it is totally professionalised, and it’ll maybe lose a wee bit of its independence. That’s unhealthy ultimately in the longer run, if not already.

“Its crushing the small man. There are lots of horrible things that are just not being dealt with adequately. All these MPs and their expenses and its all getting swept under the carpet, and it is so bare-faced. They don’t give a hoot basically. And here is me in an unpaid position as a JP. It using the big machine to crush people. It is disappointing and alienating in terms of the confidence and faith you have in things.

“There is still such a thing as right and wrong. And this was just simply not right. That sums it up. I tried to stand up and do what was right here, and I genuinely feel that. It is alienating and disappointing, and that’s a shame.”