Irksome Quirk

Douglas Gordon Goody was convicted in 1964 of taking part in The Great Train Robbery and was sentenced to 30 years. So no one gave it a second thought when an article in a Sunday newspaper called The People mentioned that Goody had been involved in the robbery. No one, that is, except Goody. He claimed that he had been libeled.

On the face of it, Goody's claim seemed absurd. But not in quirky old England. There, as in some American jurisdictions, a criminal conviction does not constitute proof of guilt in a civil case growing out of the same offense. And British courts allowed a special twist in 1964, when Convicted Safecracker Alfie Hinds realized that the one- court-does-not-recognize-what-the-other-is-doing theory could also be applied to libel cases. He sued a retired police inspector who had arrested him and who had written a series of articles saying that he was guilty. The libel jury awarded Alfie $3,640 in damages. Using the same theory, Convicted Train Robber Goody planned to nick The People for a few thousand quid.

He didn't make it. His lawyer did remind the jury of "the presumption in the law that the jury should treat the plaintiff as an innocent man who had the misfortune to have been wrongly convicted." But, The People's attorney replied, "here is a man who has been at pains to destroy his reputation throughout his adult life, claiming damages for injury to his reputation." As evidence of that, the defense sought to introduce the fact of his conviction. On a preliminary appeal, Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, ruled that the jury could consider the conviction; he added that he had always been irked anyway by "the strange rule of law which says that a conviction is not evidence of guilt." Thus simultaneously bound and freed by the law, the jury found that Goody had indeed been libeled, then awarded him <-L-2 ($5.60) in damages. He was also ordered to pay the bulk of the court costs, which are expected to come to at least $5,000.

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