August 11, 2017

Conspiracy accused acquitted of £120k offence after careful cell site analysis

A Burton Man was acquitted on the day his trial was due to start at Stafford Crown Court after Sheppards Solicitors challenged the key evidence in the case.

The man had been accused of a series of high value professional burglaries stealing property in excess of £120,00.00 in value.

The prosecution case against the defendant was that his mobile phone was being used by him in and around the key offence locations at the time the offences were taking place.

What is cell site evidence?

A mobile telephone accesses cell masts whenever it is in use and can therefore provide evidence of the location of its use. This is often relied upon by the Crown Prosecution Service to weaken any account raised by a defendant.  Cell site evidence places a mobile telephone within a radius but does not identify its exact location. It is evidence capable of supporting a proposition rather than proving it incontrovertibly.

The defendant denied the offence.  His case was simple, he was not involved in the offences and was not in the locations as alleged.

Disproving the allegations was not so simple.  There existed many thousands of pages of technical evidence used by the Police and Crown Prosecution Service.  The evidence had been taken from mobile telephones of all the accused defendants (call data and text messages), subscriber evidence obtained from the mobile phone service provider and the mobile phone cell site data.

What we did

Sheppards Solicitors set about the task of considering in excess of 10,000 pages of evidence and technical data.

We were able to demonstrate that the prosecution evidence was not as suggested and was, in fact, consistent with the defendant’s case.

It was not until the day the trial was due to start the prosecution finally agreed with the defence,

No evidence was offered against the defendant and he was found Not Guilty of the conspiracy.

After the hearing the defendant commented that he was delighted with the outcome.

Lawyers involved in the case

Mark Nicholls and Stephen Rudge had conduct of the proceedings in the Crown Court and secured the evidential acquittal