Carl Beech – the plausibility of liars and the paucity of proof
Matthew Scott, The Guardian UK
‘It was left to a BBC Panorama team and Northumbria police to uncover the evidence that Beech was a cunning liar.’
The Met was right to listen to his allegations. Its mistake was not to investigate themSun 28 Jul 2019 04.07 AEST
Carl Beech’s QC, Collingwood Thompson, was faced with a monumentally difficult task when, just before lunch on Friday, he rose to mitigate for the recently convicted serial child abuse accuser. One point he made was that the Metropolitan police policy that “complainants will be believed has had an influence on this whole case. With another approach, Mr Beech’s allegations would have been dismissed.”
There is no harder task in advocacy than mitigating after a jury has convicted your client of every count on the indictment, and I am reluctant to criticise Mr Thompson, but the argument that the police should not have been so stupid as to take Beech seriously was probably best left to others.
Nevertheless, it was entirely correct. Beech would never have achieved such notoriety and caused such damage had many others, who should have known better, not believed him, or at least pretended to do so.