How Fred Barras was killed by his family

The father of the burglar shot dead by farmer Tony Martin has been jailed for 14 years for armed robbery. Six weeks after watching Martin sent down for life for the murder of his son, Fred Barras Snr tied up a woman security guard and held a gun to her head during a £400,000 raid on a clothing warehouse.

At the trial Barras said he was “devastated” by the death of his son, also call Fred.

Not so devastated, however, to prevent him walking into an industrial estate in Normanton, West Yorkshire, wearing a balaclava and carrying a gun. He forced the terrified lone woman guard to the floor, tied her hands and feet behind her back and pointed the gun at her temple. She was left trussed up like a turkey as Barras and his gang escaped with three lorry- loads of designer clothing. Her wrists and elbows were severely bruised, she suffered damaged tendons and was so traumatised she has now had to give up her job and seek psychiatric counselling.

Barras Snr’s criminal record dates back to 1969, when, as a juvenile, he was convicted of assault causing bodily harm. He has since accumulated an impressive number of convictions, including handling stolen property, theft, battery, assaulting the police, threatening behaviour and a string of driving offences.

In court this week, his barrister claimed that his client’s return to crime – or rather being caught – after an interval of a year, may have been connected with the death of his son.

We might of thought that losing a child in a shooting incident during a burglary would have had the exact opposite effect. Surely any sane, rational decent parent would never want anything to do with firearms again. Not, just six weeks later, menace a woman with a gun in the course of a robbery.

Another member of the Barras clan, Grandmother Elizabeth Barras, was also charged with possessing a firearm and assisting an offender in connection with the clothing warehouse job but was too ill to stand trial.

The family are currently seeking legal aid to sue Tony Martin for criminal compensation over the death of Fred Jnr.

His other Grandmother Mary Dolan said, “It’s not fair that the farmer has got all the money. Fred’s mother’s only got what she gets from benefit and if Fred was still here he would be in a job now and bringing more money into the house”.

She added: “He would not have been a thief forever”.

Yes he would. When he wasn’t in prison. Certainly if his father is anything to go by. It runs in the family. It’s what they do.

Fred Jnr was 16 when he died. When he broke into Martin’s farmhouse he had already appeared in court 18 times and had 29 criminal convictions to his name, including theft, fraud and assaulting the police. He had served two months in a young offenders’ institution. He was on bail at the time of the burglary and there is evidence he had been working as a fence.

Does this sound to you like a young man who would have turned his back on crime qualified as an accountant and joined the Rotary Club?

Fred Barras Jnr had spent his life surrounded by villains and low-life. The two men who took him on the burglary that fateful night both have criminal records as long as the M4 bus lane.

Darren Bark 33, who drove the car, had 52 previous convictions stretched back 20 years, including a large number for theft, burglary and assault. He has been in and out of prison more often than Norman Stanley Fletcher. Brendan Fearon 30, a family friend occasionally described as an “uncle”, is a vicious career criminal, with 33 convictions ranging from burglary to wounding.

Throw in Fred Jnr’s CV and the three men involved in the burglary at Tony Martin’s farmhouse had 114 convictions between them. Yet they were free to roam the countryside at random, thieving and menacing householders.

But it is Tony Martin, a man with a previously unblemished record, who is in jail for life, a political prisoner. Bark and Fearon will very soon be free to resume their criminal careers.

In a sick perversion of what passes for British “justice” these days, the Home Office has even consulted Fearon on when and whether Martin should be released. And the Barras family are able to apply for legal aid to sue Martin as “victims” of crime.

As I think someone once said; we are all going to hell in a handcart.

Fred Barras Jnr has been described as a “loveable rogue”. Fred Barras Snr said after Martin’s trial: “Fred was fun-loving and always happy, with no mean streak”. (Unless you count his 29 criminal convictions, presumably.)

“He was a devoted son and brother”. And he never stood a chance. The devoted son was destined to emulate his father and his scum-of-the-earth friends. That sealed his fate.

In a laughable piece of evidence, Brendan Fearon actually claimed they had only taken Fred Jnr along that night to “keep him out of trouble”.

Tony Martin may have fired the fatal shot but it was Fred Barras Jnr’s “family” who killed him.


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The Tony Martin Case – A Personal View



This document is inspired by righteous indignation at the spectacle of the erstwhile occupant of Bleak House being coerced by an evil conspiracy of circumstances and now victimised by the vagaries of the law.

In all the reportage on this case I have been looking out for some commanding reason why Mr Tony Martin’s defence failed. I would have expected the various commentators to pick up on this commanding reason because it must have passed before them. However, if it does exist they do not seem to have had the wit to discern it, let alone promulgate it. In the absence of any such commanding reason the role of the Crown Prosecution Service downgrades to that of an Orwellian thought-police. The corollary is that the defence must have been ill-prepared, ill-presented or ill-adjudicated.

Was not Bleak House also a Charles Dickens’ novel, wherein the value of an inheritance was extinguished by the fees of hirudinous lawyers? Historically, to find oneself ‘in chancery’ (anyone unaware of the word’s derivation might well equate ‘chancery’ with ‘hazardry’) was to have one’s affairs interminably jeopardised by the intricacies of the civil law. Any contemplated chancery action necessarily involved months of considered reflection and sage advice. But the ‘hazardry’ addressed in this document stems from the reflection allowed by at the most an elapsed time of two seconds. Miniscule time for reflection notwithstanding, the pecuniary penalties can be the same — plus incarceration in gaol. For Tony Martin’s predicament stems from not chancery law but the adversarial inadequacies and procedural constraints of the criminal law.

But take note: this is not just about Tony Martin. If you are working to build up a personal estate or business; something to hand on to your children, then beware! — the debtors’ gaol is with us yet. And given two seconds of misadventure there’s a cell ready and waiting for each of us. For we live in a jurisdiction where a gaoled defendant’s right of audience in the appeal court is conditional upon him being bankrupted to fund it.

Why you may ask am I taking up the cudgels on behalf of someone who is in all probability very well served in that regard? No lawyer myself, my own experience of English law has been peripheral and specifically civil. I couldn’t afford a transcript of evidence. There’s a deal of interpolative conjecture. But then lawyers offer little else in these matters. Clearly I am in an invidious position in presuming to second-guess Tony Martin’s defence team. But there again, it is a replacement defence team, the first having been dismissed in despair. Pretentiously, this document might furnish a makeweight morsel for the learned barrister’s brief …

Like a caged animal at a medieval fair, tormented and poked at through the bars, Mr Tony Martin has become both a bête noir and a cause célèbre. Righteous indignation notwithstanding, I have striven to be as disinterested and detached as possible in what is seen as a polarising, emotive and controversial subject. Necessarily, I have had to proceed with a law drafter’s circumspection. You won’t find this an easy read. It certainly won’t sell any papers. This case has now become too complexed to allow of facile interpretation. I apologise for using some arcane legal terms, open as they are to infinite nuances of interpretation. You might see me as playing with words. But then it could be argued that lawyers (when they are not making out their bills) do little else — before putting the matter in question to the intellectual equivalent of the average bus-queue. Hence the present débacle. Hence this document.

October 2000



1. Prior to 1869 debtors languished in special gaols like the Marshalsea (where Charles Dickens’ father was incarcerated) until such time as they could raise enough money to discharge their debts or until some rich relative or friend bought their freedom. Many died in gaol. You may have thought that imprisonment for debt in Britain was abolished by the Debtors Act of 1869. However, it has transpired that there are circumstances in which you can be imprisoned indefinitely today, not only for actual debt but in anticipation of debt!

2. Perhaps we should begin by looking on the bright side; at least Mr Tony Martin escaped from the events of the night of the August 30th 1999 with the balance of his natural lifespan. Unlike his erstwhile near neighbour, farmer Mr Auger of Outwell who in 1967 was beaten, bound and gagged and left to die a slow death in an orchard.

3. The trade-off is that Mr Martin has lost his liberty, his money, his property and all his worldly goods. Having been jeopardised once by the perversities of the law, he is now in hazard a second time. ‘Catch 22’ rages apace. He is entitled to an appeal hearing — but only if and when he can pay for it. On top of his existing costs, the appeal has been valued at £200,000. This means he stays in prison until his estate is valued and sold off. Only when he is rendered destitute does legal aid ‘kick in’. His predicament is analogous to that of the Dickensian debtor in the old Marshalsea gaol.

4. Furthermore he is likely to face publicly-funded actions for damages, brought by his assailants or their survivors. It’s a fair bet they will have no difficulty in obtaining legal aid.

5. And that’s not all. He has, variously, achieved notoriety and become a cause célèbre. And he is perceived to be at risk of death or injury from contract killers and hostile fellow prisoners.

6. It behoves us to enquire how he was got into this predicament in the first place and how, if at all, he is to be extricated from it. To do this it is necessary to delve into the intricacies of the English criminal law and the vagaries of the English judicial system.

The Salient Facts :

7. On the night of August 20th 1999 three persons, Fred Barras 16, Brendan Fearon 30 and Darren Bark 34, travelled by car from Newark to Emneth Hungate for the purpose of robbing Bleak House, an isolated farm property owned and solely occupied by Mr Anthony Martin. They had received information in a local pub that there were valuables on the property. They got past Mr Martin’s three dogs which he kept in an outbuilding and advanced on the dwelling house. Fearon and Barras effected entry by forcing a ground floor window. Mr Martin heard noises and saw lights. He left his first floor bedroom armed with a loaded five-shot pump action shotgun. While still at some distance from the intruders he was caught in a torch beam. He fired a total of three shots, one in the general direction of the torch beam and two more into ‘total darkness’. Fearon and Barras both sustained gunshot wounds but were able to retreat from the property through the same window. Bark who was driving the car apparently made off in it without waiting for his accomplices. Fearon managed to get away from the farm but Barras crawled away into some undergrowth where he was later found by the police, having died from his injuries.

8. Mr Martin left the property in his car and after calling at his mother’s where he left the gun he booked into an hotel where he was subsequently arrested on a rake of charges derived from the police’s interpretation of the events.

The Charges :

9. He was subsequently arraigned at Norwich crown court, charged with (1) murder of Barras, (2) wounding Fearon with intent, (3) attempted murder of Fearon, and (4) possessing a shotgun with intent to endanger life [the numbered sequence of the charges is specific to this document and may not reflect the bill of indictment].

10. The logic of this rake of charges seems to have been to provide long-stops so as to ensure at least one ‘guilty’ verdict. As we shall see, in the event this ‘catch-all’ strategy gave rise to illogicalities with incontrovertible grounds for appeal against the adverse verdicts and throwing doubt upon the conduct of the trial.

The Verdicts :

11. The trial lasted eight days. Initially the jury unanimously returned ‘not guilty’ verdicts on the third and fourth charges. They then retired for a further nine hours before, by a majority of 10 to 2, returning ‘guilty’ verdicts on the first and second charges. The sequence in which these verdicts were returned is significant.

The Sentences :

12. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and a concurrent ten years for wounding [Fearon] with intent.

The Conduct of the Trial :

13. It is difficult to conclude other than that the whole affair was a complete ‘dog’s breakfast’ — a confused and misdirected jury, a lacklustre defence advocacy and a judge who was negligent in the conduct of the trial. In spite of the most extreme circumstances, the elements of self-defence seem to have been successfully circumvented by the Prosecution and the impression conveyed that Mr Martin was acting solely in defence of property.

14. The rake of charges and the respective verdicts is as follows: -

1. Murder of Barras [guilty by a majority of 10-2]

2. Wounding [Fearon] with intent under the Offences against the Person Act 1861 s.18 [guilty by a majority of 10-2]

3. Attempted murder of Fearon under the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 s.1 [not guilty, unanimous]

4. Possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life under the Firearms Act 1968 s.16 [not guilty, unanimous]

15. We swiftly perceive gross anomalies in these findings.

16. Regarding charge 3: in the light of the contemporaneous verdict on charge 4 and the fact that the firearm in question was the essence of the actus reus, the import of the jury’s finding can be expressed in two ways:- either that Fearon’s life was endangered solely by the exercise of reasonable force in self-defence; or that the accused did not intend to murder Fearon despite using the lethal force inherent in the firearm.

17. Regarding charge 4, the import of the jury’s finding was that Mr Martin was not in possession of a firearm ready for use if and when the occasion arose in a manner which would endanger life.

18. Reverting to charge 3, either interpretation effectively severs the actus reus from the mens rea (the methodology from the mind-set if you like — the prerequisites for an act of murder). Having regard to the agreed narrative of events, the import of the jury’s findings must, in ineluctable logic, translate to the first charge. The accused remains exposed in regard to the second charge.

19. Reverting to charge 4, the abjuration of any intent to endanger life with the instrument that manifestly did endanger life must, in ineluctable logic, negate the mens rea for the first and third charges. The accused still remains exposed in regard to the second charge but, on the ground that the greater includes the lesser, self-defence as per paragraph 16 must surely prevail.

20. Upon receiving these first two verdicts therefore, the judge should have interdicted the proceedings and discharged the accused (the actual procedural methodologies available to him need not concern us here).

21. An inescapable corollary of this is that in the absence of such interdiction the Defence should have interjected that there was no case to answer on the two unaddressed charges.

22. So much for matters arising from the trial itself. Irrespective for the time being of the evidence adduced thereat, firstly we must circumscribe Mr Martin’s predicament on that night of August 20th 1999, that is, his predicament in that place and at the material time. We must consider what were his perceptions and we must do this regardless of any prior or subsequent actions omissions or utterances.

In that place.…

23. Mr Martin had done his best to secure Bleak House against illegal entry. Any intruders must therefore be assumed not to be casual opportunists pushing open an unlocked door, rather they would be calculated and targetted professionals — to use the vernacular, they must be assumed to be mob-handed, tooled up and macho. There was no mains electric light available in the invaded rooms. There was no telephone. The nearest habitations were out of sight and sound, probably even of gunshot.

At the material time.…

24. The crux of the case is that precise critical moment when he became exposed in the torch beam with the gun in his hands on the night of August 20 1999, with several hours to go before first light howsoever he may have arrived at that moment.

With these perceptions.…

25. The following perceptions have to be adduced in the prevailing circumstances :

he was cognisant of the fate of Mr Auger of Outwell in 1967
the intruders were mob-handed, tooled-up and macho
they were interposed between him and any feasible escape route
they may have been revisiting the property after burglarising it the previous May
prudence demanded he assume they had firearms
they’d got past his dogs, probably by harming them
the adrenaline rush he was experiencing combined with his age (55) and medical condition might result in a heart attack, leaving him helpless, unsuccoured and at the mercy of his assailants
they could see he had a lethal weapon in his hands
it was incumbent upon him to keep it out of their hands
the immediate circumstances gave them a pretext to harm him in self-defence
the immediate circumstances gave them the opportunity to harm him per se
any attempt to entreat might cost him his life
the torchholder might be holding the torch at a lateral distance from his body as a defensive ruse
26. The Crown Prosecution Service — and subsequently the Defence — should have been been able to intuit all these elements of Mr Martin’s perception. The CPS should also have assumed them to be concurrent and virtually instantaneous with no time for reflection (on the grounds that we can think our thoughts before we can speak or write them, it should not be postulated that the accused would have taken time to concatenate the requisite phraseology in his mind.) They should be considered in no particular order. That he may have been mistaken in some of them does not compromise a concomitant defence.

27. These elements are all apprehensions of varying intensity. They are all elements of panic. Mr Martin is no more guilty of murder than are the hapless passengers in a founding vessel who trample to death one of their number in a stampede for the lifeboats. The apprehensions arising from the two scenarios are different; panic is universal. One cannot intercede after the event and impute guilt for extraneous reasons. That for instance some of the stampeders were stowaways. Or, to invoke an extreme analogy, that the deceased person had been induced aboard the vessel by an intending murderer. The exonerating principle is enshrined in law; the unforeseen sinking construes in lawyer-speak as causa nova interveniens; even though his quarry did not survive it, no culpability can translate to the would-be murderer via the supervening marine casualty.

28. The CPS lawyers seem much exercised by the number of shots fired. They demonstrate a total inability to imagine themselves in the accused’s predicament. It could simply be that all three shots arose from sheer panic; a reflex action facilitated by the configuration of the weapon.

29. Alternatively I respectfully submit that the Prosecution is unable to adduce that any and all the elements of the following rationale did not obtain and, insofar as any action he took was pre-emptive, that he was not fully justified in so acting:

The first shot.…

30. The Prosecution and Defence agree (presumably on the basis of the forensic evidence and the testimony of Fearon) that three shots were fired and that the first shot was fired in the general direction of the source of light. If that was the shot which did all the fatal and non-fatal injury then the above perceptions demand that Self-Defence obtains and that is an end of the matter. There is no such thing as retrospective mens rea.

31. When Mr Martin’s presence was disclosed by the torch beam, standing as he was at some distance with a firearm at the ready, he was inadvertently inviting a retaliatory act of self-defence by the intruders. His perception of this demanded that Mr Martin assume they were armed; if not with firearms then certainly with other offensive weapons. They were certainly capable of hurling missiles at him.

32. At that precise point in the narrative of events therefore, Mr Martin had no option but to shoot towards the light source. To have required any lesser action — such as attempting to open a dialogue with them — would have been tantamount to requiring him to contribute to his own mortal imperilment.

The second shot.…

33. Albeit this was literally a shot in the dark, in view of his perception, and indeed the fact, that his assailants were mob-handed, tooled-up and macho, a ‘military’ solution was the only course of action open to Mr Martin. Because of his extreme imperilment he was obliged to act so as to disable as many of the intruders as possible and as quickly as possible until he perceived the total number of them no longer posed a threat.

The third shot.…

34. By reason of the usual farmer’s double-barrelled shotgun requiring a time-consuming break-action reload (with the possibility of a ‘fumble’) thus giving the intruders the opportunity to turn the tables on him, a further shot became necessary to demonstrate that such an opportunity was not available to them. This evolution assumes extreme criticality if he had to pass through a door aperture to ‘clear’ a further compartment with attendant risk of ambuscade. He could not assume their flight from the premises.

Regardless of any prior actions omissions or utterances.…

35. We may now duly consider these. Much seems to have been made in court (and in the media) of the significance of Mr Martin’s acts, omissions and utterances both before and after the event and also his lifestyle and demeanour. In view of the perversity of the verdicts it seems highly probable that the jury was influenced thereby. It behoves us therefore to consider the validity of any evidence adduced therefrom and attempt to differentiate between what is germane and what is extraneous and irrelevant.

36. We must be congnisant that prior to the break in of August 20th 1999 Bleak House had suffered an earlier break-in in May. Furniture and valuables had been stolen and personal effects strewn about the landscape.

37. Subsequent to this, evidence was adduced of complaints that Mr Martin was abusing his firearms privileges by firing his shotgun in the general direction of trespassers on his farm, albeit no trespasser was injured thereby. These complaints, combined with his cavalier views on potential intruders expressed at Farmwatch meetings, induced the local police to revoke his firearms certification and to confiscate his guns.

38. He subsequently acquired the five-shot pump action shotgun used in the incident of August 20th 1999. Mr Martin was in criminal contravention of 1988 legislation requiring such weapons to be modified so that the magazine can accommodate no more than two cartridges. Also, Mr Martin held no documentation authorising his possession of any firearm. Furthermore it was not secured in the approved manner against unauthorised use or theft. Mr Martin kept it in his bedroom. There were caches of cartridges at random locations on the property. There is no evidence that he kept it permanently loaded against the possibility of intruders.

39. Mr Martin alleges that the firearm was deposited in his car by persons unknown. If the Prosecution was unable to adduce any evidence to the contrary Mr Martin committed no offence in the manner of his acquisition of an illegally configured firearm. His subsequent failure properly to divest himself of it would be an offence under the Firearms Act.

40. Unlawful in its (acquisition and) possession it may have been but the proof of the pudding was in the eating on that fateful night of August 20th 1999. That Mr Martin was guilty of offences under the prevailing firearms legislation is admitted. That his timely possession of the offending weapon was the reason for his having survived to be called to account for those offences could be a unique and monumental plea in mitigation. I respectfully submit the Prosecution cannot show other than that it was the instrument of his deliverance. Deliverance from what, we can only conjecture. The fate of farmer Auger comes readily to mind. For the present we are considering why that deliverance was from the frying pan of violence into the fire of the law!

41. Had Fred Barras been a trespasser crossing a field or farmyard when he received his mortal wound then the police’s prior action and Mr Martin’s subsequent unlawful circumvention of it would be significant elements in the chain of causation. But Fred Barras was not a simple daytime trespasser. He was one of an unknown number of nocturnal intruders of unknown propensities interposed between Mr Martin and his escape route.

42. Also, the maxim causa proxima, non remota, spectatur readily springs to mind. For the purpose of imputing culpability Mr Martin’s circumvention of the police action was, in lawyer-speak, causa sine qua non, not causa causans — the intruders would in the prevailing circumstances have been shot anyway, but with a legally-held weapon (subject to the three-shot scenario postulated above).

43. The intemperate — and apparently unchallenged — verbiage of the Prosecution in court was that Mr Martin shot the intruders “like rats in a trap”, implying that he baited a ‘honey trap’ for intruders then “lay in wait” for them. Had the break-in of August 20th 1999 not happened, presumably the Prosecution would have him waiting to this day to spring his trap! Had Mr Martin set loaded spring guns and anti-personnel mines in the grounds or lethal booby traps in the buildings this might construe as the mens rea for murder against persons unknown. He did nothing like those things.

44. For the above to hold good it would be necessary for the Prosecution to adduce evidence that Mr Martin seeded the territory with tales of rich pickings to be had in an undefended location. That he did the diametric opposite can be attributed to due prudence or bravura - it does not matter which; either way it was defensive propaganda entirely understandable and legitimate in the parlous crime situation obtaining in that part of Norfolk.

45. Perhaps we should remind ourselves that Mr Martin was only doing what nation-states, including Great Britain, have been doing since time immemorial — parading their might before the world with the implied message “do not trifle with us”. We do not expect nations to highlight shortcomings in their defences. They do not say “we are lighly armed and might be an embarassment to you on a good day”.

46. The unfortunate corollary of Mr Martin’s bellicose propaganda is that any intruders that did descend upon his home had to be assumed to be mob-handed, tooled-up and macho. When that situation was realised on August 20th 1999 Mr Martin, in that place at the material time and with his perceptions, was obliged to make that assumption.

47. Mr Martin’s prior actions or omissions were equivocal in one respect. To have removed or failed to have replaced some of the stair treads in the property was to put at risk any benign intruders into his property — fire, police, ambulance, doctor or any neighbour concerned for his health or safety etc. He might have been at risk of action in tort arising from such a contingency. So be it. None of this is germane to the case.

48. Mr Martin may similarly be criticised for omitting to instal intruder alarms on his property. On this point he would be entitled to opine that, having regard to the common experience regarding attitude and response times of the local police, intruder alarms would be a waste of money and that he put his faith in the guarding propensities of his three dogs.

49. Various epithets have been applied to Mr Martin by the Chief Constable of Norfolk, Kenneth Williams, and others, generally on the lines of recluse, loner, bachelor, eccentric etc. It needs to be pointed out therefore that in this jurisdiction gregariouness and marriage are not prerequisites for citizenship. Much was made of the untidiness and state of disrepair of Bleak House and its curtilage. In this jurisdiction the citizen is not obliged to light his home, nor to keep it tidy nor to expedite any repairs or alterations he may have in hand. Any act or omission in that regard is not germane to the case.

50. Apparently Mr Martin testified that he habitually slept fully clothed. There is no conceivable reason why he should have vouchsafed this information. His so doing can only be interpreted as indicative of his transparent ingenuousness. However it seems to have been interpreted as indicative of guilt.

Regardless of any subsequent actions omissions or utterances.…

51. We may now duly consider these. After Mr Martin had secured his safety and presumably recovered his composure to some extent he ventured out in his car looking for signs of the intruders. He took the gun with him for (a) obvious self-protection and (b) to obviate it falling into the hands of any remaining intruders lurking in the vicinity.

52. There are no grounds for alleging that, had he come across any injured intruders, he would not have rendered due assistance and called the emergency services once he had established they no longer posed a threat .

53. Mr Martin omitted to report the break-in to the police. He was not obliged to do so but as it was a potentially serious incident he may have been imprudent in this. However, his perception was that the intruders had made their getaway, albeit possibly with some injury. He was not aware of the presence of the mortally-wounded Fred Barras lying in the undergrowth. Furthermore, it cannot be said that any subsequent action or omission culpably contributed to the fate of Fred Barras.

The attitude and utterances of the police :

54. The matter of the epithets applied to Mr Martin by the Chief Constable of Norfolk, Kenneth Williams, and others, has already been addressed in paragraph 49 and it only remains to reiterate that any act or omission in that regard is not germane to the case.

55. The Chief Constable in an interview with the Eastern Daily Press opines that the verdicts are “absolutely right”. It is disturbing to think that such a senior official is unable to perceive the unresolvable paradoxes they pose. He has also described the death of Barras as “cold-blooded murder”. In that place, at the material time and with those perceptions any reasonable person would construe Mr Martin’s actions (reactions) as the diametric opposite of “cold-blooded”. As a gratuitous makeweight he clearly equates Mr Martin’s alleged eccentricity with culpability. So much for a “cold analytical approach”. One rests one’s case.

56. Some twelve hours elapsed between the shooting and the finding of Barras’s body. This is commented upon at length in paragraph 75 below.

57. The matter of the accused’s rights before, during and after his arrest needs to be gone into. The police seem to have elicited certain utterances from the accused subsequently construed as incriminating but possibly attributable to post-traumatic shock and automatism, when he may have been without benefit of qualified and competent legal advice. All adverse evidenced adduced from this source should have been challenged.

The attitude and utterances of the Crown Prosecution Service :

58. We can get some insight into the mind-set of the CPS from the ‘catch-all’ rake of charges preferred against Mr Martin. As we have seen, this strategy didn’t work. It has thrown up unresolvable anomalies giving incontrovertible grounds for appeal against the two adverse verdicts.

59. The CPS lawyers Nicholas Crampton and Peter Tidey say there are “a number of factors” that justify the murder charge. I perceive no such factors, only subjective adverse perceptions entirely extraneous to the salient facts of the case.

60. Their utterances are revealing, viz. “you can draw inferences as to state of mind depending on what you can show the man has done”. Of course the CPS have a job to do protecting the public from criminality but they seem to have regarded Mr Martin as a challenge, a trophy to be achieved regardless of any sustainable evidence.

61. The CPS should not have proceeded on the assumption that criminality was inherent in this incident. They exceed the bounds of credibility in attempting to second-guess Mr Martin’s thought-processes when he was pitched into mortal peril. One has to take the circumstances as one finds them. If they can have both a malign and a benign interpretation natural justice demands that one accepts the latter and not adduce extraneous facts and subjective perceptions to fit one’s own agenda.

62. Of course it is to be regretted that 16 year old Fred Barras lost his life in the traumatic events of the night of August 20th 1999 but, specific to his demise, the most likely rationale is that all the protagonists were victims of an evil conspiracy of circumstances not culpably influenced by any of them. However, one might mischievously conjecture that had the fatality occurred to one of his mature accomplices the matter might not have been pursued with the same degree of zeal.

63. It is to be hoped that the CPS will now go some way to undoing that damage they have caused, by not impeding Mr Martin’s appeal — should it ever get into court.

The citizen must not take the law into his own hands.…

64. If there is one chestnut that has been trotted out ad nauseam about this case it’s this one. Circumstances alter cases. The fact is that in that place and at the material time and with those perceptions there was no law available to Mr Martin other than the law of the jungle. His stark choice was either to prevail over his assailants with the force at his command or risk a fate similar to that of Mr Auger.

Latest developments :

65. Already criminals are taking heart from the Martin verdict; witness Gamage v. Kirby at Norwich county court wherein an intruder sued for injuries occasioned during a citizens’ arrest.

66. On September 25th the Court of Appeal refused Mr Martin’s application for legal aid because his assets exceeded £3,000. His appeal will remain stalled unless and until he can vouchsafe £200,000 to cover the costs.

67. Mr Nick Makin and Mr Anthony Scrivenor have been replaced by Mr James Saunders and Mr Michael Wolkind as Mr Martin’s defence team. Whether they will prepared to act pro bono publico in view of their client’s judicially-induced impecuniosity remains to be seen. There is apparently some acrimony between the present and former defence teams regarding outstanding costs and with allusions to incomplete case files.

Provocation :

68. I believe that provocation is now being mooted as a retrospective ground for defence. The constraints and propensities of the English adversarial court procedures preclude hydra-headed defence strategies, just as they preclude objective consideration of the facts of a case, especially in retrospect. The present case should be capable of disposal on the basis of the paradoxical verdicts. This would be seen as acquittal on technicalities, but so be it. An unsatisfactory alternative might be a retrial. However I’ll leave that to the lawyers — if and when they get round to it.

69. The defence of provocation necessarily implies a prior concern (in this case for property) to the exclusion of any concomitant concern for personal safety. On the basis of the information before me it would seem that self-defence was the only road down which to go. In the present case the greater concern surely extinguishes the lesser; his manifest imperilment and the state of mind induced thereby are commanding reasons for his acting solely in self-defence. All the credible elements for such a defence were present.

Updates, Qualifications and Conclusions :

70. Relative to paragraph 10: It might mischievously be conjectured that the charge of murder was preferred on the unexpressed understanding that no normal jury would convict thereupon. In which case the police and/or the CPS are to be congratulated on their albeit unsuccessful attempt at doing good by stealth and on the attendant ‘smoke screen’. However, the number and nature of the charges seems to belie any such hidden agenda.

71. Relative to paragraph 25: Mr Martin testified that he fired below the level of the source of light. If he entertained the final perception listed — which admittedly is unlikely — then he may have doubly tried to obviate injury to the torch holder. This would be further relevant if he perceived the source of light to be framed by a door aperture. If the forensic evidence supports this then it seems Mr Martin voluntarily abated the lethal force at his command at some commensurate augment of his imperilment.

72. Relative to paragraph 27: The further analogy postulated therein should not be interpreted as implying murderous intent on the part of Mr Martin.

73. The media (and the court?) were much exercised by forensic evidence indicating that Fred Barras was shot in the back. Paragraphs 30, 33 and 34 variously address this factor. If the complete forensic evidence runs counter to paragraph 30 then the deceased’s fate must be considered analogous to that of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano at the hands of HMS Conqueror — she may have been steaming away from the ‘exclusion zone’ but she could have been quickly brought about and therefore still posed an undiminished threat. What is sauce for the goose …

74. Relative to paragraph 35 et seq: It may have been that by his prior actions omissions and utterances Mr Martin had inadvertently painted himself into a corner but at the material time the force he used to extricate himself cannot be considered excessive by reason of there having been no other feasible course of action and no effective lesser force available to him.

75. It does not escape our notice that some 12 hour elapsed between the shooting and the police finding of Barras’s body. Presumably the police were apprised of the involvement of Barras by Fearon when they arrested him in the small hours of the morning. Having been thus put on enquiry they should have searched the grounds of Bleak House as soon as possible. It might so be that had they acted with proper despatch then Barras would have been found much earlier and his life saved. If this is so then the police, collectively or individually, may well have demonstrated subjective recklessness or gross negligence as to death or grievous bodily harm. Such derelictions are the pre-requisites for a charge of involuntary manslaughter or alternatively criminal misconduct in a public office under common law (Mr Williams could hardly plead lack of resources!).

76. As the law stands it is unlikely that the accused would derive any mitigating benefit by such action, nevertheless the jury had a right to enquire as to any delay in searching the scene of crime and the consequences of such delay as derived from the medical evidence. A corollary of this is that Barras’s next of kin might accrue a cause of action in tort against the police for any quantifiable loss they had suffered by his death.

77. As I write this (15.10.00), it seems that regardless of the merits of his appeal Mr Tony Martin’s predicament in the year 2000 is analogous to that of an 18th century debtor languishing in the old Marshalsea prison.