Why so small? Because the media knows - the biggest reward for fake stories comes not from the CICA but from newspapers and TV paying for "exclusives".

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7041185...ly-compensation.html

It is possibly embarrassing to know that they have been colluding with someone's sick fantasy?

Unless Carl beech decides it's time to plead guilty the best is yet to come and MWT knows what is coming so be careful what is brought out prior to the evidence coming out in court.

no not a lot of reporting but....early days.

I think the bombshells are yet to come.

At the moment we are just getting the reading of the charges ...it's not until questioning when the possible fireworks happen.

Wonder if Tom Watson MP may be called to give evidence?

The defence to begin with brought up the idea that a lot of sex abuse cases are one person's word against another, hence lack of corroborating evidence for Beech's original allegations. Also the defence is likely to bring up the police 'credible and true' statement. The prosecution got in a pre-emptive strike there. There might be a defence strategy of hoping the jury will think it is unfair to convict Beech when a senior police officer said such a thing.

The prosecution have been able to bring up Beech's child sex convictions which may obviously sway the jury another way. While, Beech's child sex crimes are disgusting I have to wonder about the justice of bringing them up in a trial for false allegations of child sex abuse about others. I thought the prosecution could only do that when you are accusing the police of lying, i.e. you are accusing them of bad character stuff, they can do the same to you. Otherwise they can only do it when it is a related offence-e.g. an accused murderer who has already been convicted of 2 other murders carried out in exactly the same way. I fail to see how being a child sex offender makes it more likely Beech made false allegations about others.

Anon wrote:

The prosecution have been able to bring up Beech's child sex convictions which may obviously sway the jury another way. While, Beech's child sex crimes are disgusting I have to wonder about the justice of bringing them up in a trial for false allegations of child sex abuse about others. I thought the prosecution could only do that when you are accusing the police of lying, i.e. you are accusing them of bad character stuff, they can do the same to you. Otherwise they can only do it when it is a related offence-e.g. an accused murderer who has already been convicted of 2 other murders carried out in exactly the same way. I fail to see how being a child sex offender makes it more likely Beech made false allegations about others.

That was also my understanding of the bad character rules. I agree that it's irrelevant to the case against Mr Beech. It obviously prejudices the minds of the jury against him, while not having any bearing on whether or not his stories are lies.

The actual case against him seems to be

- there's no corroborating evidence (pretty common)

- his wife says he mentioned nothing for 20 years (also pretty common)

- he looked up some stuff online (very common)

If Mr Beech was lying, he's caused great anguish to several people and wasted police resources that could have been deployed to save lives. But this trial shows the folly of prosecuting people without any evidence, just an accusation. How do we determine who is the defendant?

Anon wrote:
I fail to see how being a child sex offender makes it more likely Beech made false allegations about others.

If you look at the loudest drum bangers they normally have another agenda ie taking the eye off the real ball.
Beech was obviously trying to cover his tracks of looking at images of children and knew if caught he was in the pool, so diverting away this poor poor victim of the brutal rapes and threats to his life and nuts from a penknife wielding MP diverts the attention.

I always say it's the ones shouting the most have the skeletons piled up.
False accusers
Ex cops
Paedophile hunters
Ex cops
Gay bashers
Ex cops
Sorry forgot to mention Ex Cops

Carl Beech is incredibly clever and very good at absorbing information and creative in his thinking one hell of a lot of work went into his planning but like lots of liars once he got the audience hooked and "was believed" he kept adding to his stories and never thought his computers would be looked into albeit he tried to hide his research.

I agree that the best is yet to come out, it's set to be a 6 week trial.

I agree with most of the comments here and it is impressive to see how many people are prepared to examine the detail of the media coverage in an intelligent way. Once more I state; whatever his guilt or innocence, the truly evil are the police, media and CPS in this area of false allegations. Almost every time their behaviour is the truly shocking part of it. Please watch this...

The prosecution may have some genuine points to make. They allege he sent an email to himself in the name of someone else to back up his claims. This could be seen as perverting justice, if true. In general though it it very hard to prove that someone was lying about being abused.

If I claim that Theresa May slept with me when I was 14 and that she therefore belongs in prison how on Earth can anyone prove I am lying? A jury can say of course she didn't bloody sleep with him but that is not good enough to convict me of lying, there has to be a bit more. There may be a bit more with Beech or there may not but I wouldn't want to predict anything about the verdict on this one. I hate to say it but I don't think such prosecutions are really the deliverance the falsely accused may hope they are. Firm advocacy of basic principles of rule of law might be more to the point.