generalspeaking

Stunning Justice Miscarriage

"Standing here, before all of you, I honestly thought I would be addressing you following a very different verdict."
"I am, for the second time in the space of one year, utterly shocked and appalled."
Lissie Harper, outside Old Bailey, London England

PC Harper got married to his fiancée Lissie just four weeks before he was killed   PA Media

Death delivered to a British police officer engaged in the line of duty, protecting the public from the human scum that also lives and works within that same society, people who prey on others, proudly perform criminal acts, defy law and order, and make life and limb unsafe for others in their pursuit of a life based on the avails of crime. Lissie Harper, wife of British Constable Andrew Harper, hoping for due justice on behalf of her husband whose "barbaric" murder shocked the country was left instead once again "shocked and appalled".

She sat in court during the trial of three teens accused of first-degree murder of her husband, at the Old Bailey. All the while the three who murdered her husband smirked, laughed, dozed off and obviously were not the least bit concerned while the trial was presented with evidence against them. One juror was removed when she was seen to be continually smiling at the three killers throughout the judge's charge to the jury.

Andrew Harper, 28, died of multiple injuries  August 2019. Photograph: PA

And when the jury returned to deliver their verdict it was not the expected conviction of murder but that of the lesser charge of manslaughter. According to a former policing minister, the jury choice was sufficiently off-kilter given the situation and the evidence, to convince him to refer the trial to the Attorney General, concerned that the jury may have been tampered with; some among them under duress of threats.

Henry Long, 19, Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, 18, reacted after the jury delivered its verdict by hugging, laughing and displaying all the mannerisms of people completely divorced from the realities of crime and punishment.  A gang had been seen stealing a quad bike and Constable Harper responded, becoming entangled in the tow rope attached to the car driven by Henry Long. Enabling the three to conclude their exciting criminal escapade by dragging him for over a mile to his death.


"With his ankles caught in a strap that was trailing behind a car being driven at speed along a country lane, he was dragged for over a mile along the road surface, swung from side to side like a pendulum in an effort to dislodge him, losing items of his police uniform along the way, with the rest of his uniform being quite literally ripped and stripped from his body."
"When, at last, he became disentangled, he was left with the most awful injuries, from which he died there on the road, surrounded by colleagues who tried in vain to save him."
'[The jury heard that he died naked apart from his socks and boots and some shredded remnants of the trousers he was wearing]. This was a completely senseless killing of a young police officer in the line of duty."
"As [Henry] Long floored the car to make good their escape, PC Harper was lassoed around his ankles by the loop of his strap. It is the prosecution case that Long drove that car knowing full well that PC Harper was entangled in the strap, as he drove in a manner calculated to dislodge him, and to make good their escape, as had been the plan all along."
Brian Altman QC, prosecuting attorney

Albert Bowers (left) and Jessie Cole (centre) leaving Reading Magistrates' Court on September 19, 2019