Scotland Yard and prosecutors faced demands yesterday to justify a £15 million investigation into tabloid newspapers after the final two journalists prosecuted were found not guilty.
Chris Pharo, 46, news editor of The Sun, and Jamie Pyatt, 52, a reporter, were cleared at the Old Bailey of aiding a police officer to commit misconduct in a public office by paying him for information. The verdicts bring to a close a string of trials in which juries consistently cleared journalists of wrong-doing over their dealings with police officers and other public officials.
Scotland Yard’s Operation Elveden investigation into allegedly unlawful payments to public officials led to 29 journalists being charged but has resulted in only two being convicted.
Mr Pharo and Mr Pyatt questioned why taxpayers’ money had been spent on prosecuting journalists for “doing their job”. Mr Pharo said: “How could anyone imagine that spending more than £30 million over four years prosecuting journalists for doing their job was remotely in the public interest?”
The Old Bailey was told that Simon Quinn, a Surrey police officer, had been paid £10,000 by The Sun for tips on investigations including the murder of Milly Dowler, the rapist Tony Imiela and Daniel Gonzalez, who killed four people.
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Quinn admitted misconduct in public office between 2002 and 2011 and was jailed in April for 18 months. The Sun journalists denied encouraging him to breach his professional duty.
Mr Pyatt, a Thames Valley district reporter, insisted that the information he received was in the “public interest” and there was “nothing in there so confidential and secret the public don’t have a right to read it”. He criticised the decision to tie up 80 Met officers who, he said, should have been on the streets.
Mr Pharo told the court that his only involvement was valuing some of Mr Pyatt’s stories and passing the reporter’s requests for cash payments to his Surrey police source up the editorial chain for authorisation.
He complained that his former editor Rebekah Brooks was “back in her job” as chief executive of what is now News UK, while he was answering questions about the affair in court. News UK is the parent company of The Times.
Journalists’ confidential sources came to light in the midst of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World in 2011 when News International handed over millions of emails to police. The two convictions of journalists resulting from Operation Elveden are Anthony France, a crime reporter for The Sun, who is appealing against his guilty verdict, while Dan Evans, a reporter for the News of the World, pleaded guilty. Neither man was jailed.
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The Crown Prosecution Service defended its decision to seek a retrial, saying in a statement: “It is right that a jury, rather than the CPS, decides whether a defendant is guilty or not.”
Analysis
The use of an obscure 13th-century law to prosecute tabloid journalists for paying public officials appeared to be a clever way to bring the press to heel.
Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, said that prosecutors had found a way to secure convictions in “a complicated area of the law”. Two men on the staff of the now-defunct News of the World were found guilty of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office with payments to a police officer and soldier for information. When the journalists appealed the basis of the prosecutions started to unravel.
Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the lord chief justice, ruled in April that juries should have been told to consider whether the supply of information by public officials “has the effect of harming the public interest”.
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The Crown Prosecution Service reviewed the outstanding cases and decided not to seek a retrial of the reporters and to drop charges against a further nine.
Juries have cleared a string of journalists in the other cases, in effect deciding that there was a public interest in journalists paying public officials for information.
The public officials who were charged have been less fortunate. Most pleaded guilty, and although some were cleared others have been convicted.
The case by numbers
£14.2m cost of police investigation
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£1.35m CPS costs (to March 2015)
£4.5m court and defence costs
66 people charged, including 29 journalists, 11 police officers and staff, and 20 public officials
31 convictions, including 2 journalists and 11 police officers and staff