Investigations and research are a pretrial necessity.
Judge Accused of being “Bent as a Banana” in child abuse case
Investigative journalist Richard Carvath has called Judge Jeremy Lea “as bent as a banana”
It has been hard to work out the truth of this case in Nottinghamshire.
Partly this is due to
- lack of information
- court restrictions
- having worked out the establishments official story, there is the problem of judging how close this is to the truth.
It appears a family court judgment made a mothers two boys, ward of the court. It was critical of her but the mother (Samantha Baldwin) ignored the judgment took the children with her, against the wishes of the authorities. She was “missing” for several days and then went to police who have taken now taken the children from her. In the meantime the police and family courts have issued statements. It appears that family members were threatened with charges of helping the mother take the children.
Samantha Baldwin in happier timesTwo useful posts on the case are from the Transparency Project.
2017 Apr 3 Police hunt for mother who has abducted her own children – what on earth is going on? [15]
This post summarises what was known on the 3rd and 4th of April and has links to several corporate media articles if people wish to research them. They do not seem to add much to the facts, and corporate media almost never link to sources, so I will not reference them here.
The Transparency Project article states that on 27 Mar the Family Court held a hearing about these two boys. It decided to declare the boys wards of court. Probably on 3 Apr the Family Court then issued a statement via the police website, which now appears to be unavailable, which included
“Miss Baldwin is now missing. It is assumed that she has abducted [the children]. The children have now been made wards of Court. Miss Baldwin is considered to pose a risk of harm to the children.”
Superintendent Richard Fretwell of Nottinghamshire Police was in charge of the search for Samantha Baldwin.
The article then explains some useful definitions such as abduction and custody.
The next article, 2017 Apr 10 Samantha Baldwin – another side to a very sad story [16] has more useful information.
It contains links and copies of
- text of a judgment read out in open court (and hence reportable)
- statement from the children’s father David Madge
- the mother made allegations of sexual abuse of the boys by the father, and others, some years ago;
- these were the subject of a lengthy fact-finding hearing very recently (12 days, which is a significant duration for a trial in a private law case), but it seems likely that any criminal investigation associated with this hearing did not lead to charges against the father;
- after 12 days of evidence from the parents, and a host of other witnesses and consideration of more than 2,000 pages of documents, the judge decided that the mother had failed to prove that it was more likely than not that her allegations were true, although she did genuinely believe them to be true;
- more than that, he found that she was so convinced that the allegations were true that she had gone to the lengths of drugging the boys in order to bolster the case that the children were victims of abuse – in essence she fabricated evidence in the hope of securing the finding she believed was justified;
- and the judge found that when the mother realised the writing was on the wall, she made a plan and then whisked the children away to her chalet to prevent the court from acting on its judgment.
- The children are now temporarily in foster care – the reason given for them not returning immediately to the care of their father is that as a result of their mother’s own irrational belief, they may now have a false belief that they were in fact abused by their father. It also appears that they have not had contact with, let alone been cared for by their father for some years.
He says that he has to balance getting the truth to the public whilst still protecting the legally admissible evidence that is needed to seek justice for them. (OBO stands for On Behalf Of, and it appears that someone is operating his twitter account, presumably with his permission)
