The police had a CCTV camera on the yard, they knew the drugs were coming. We don’t know who told them; cops get understandably cagey about letting anything slip that might identify a grass or insider. So they knew the location of the drop-off point, but what else did the informant tell them?
He or she obviously named the yard, but did they finger Geoff? Of course not, because Geoff didn’t know anything about it. When Geoff turned up at the yard after one of his employees told him there were "cops all over the place" he wasn’t recognised. The registration number of his car wasn’t recognised. It seemed the cops didn’t know who he was – that the informant didn’t name Geoff.
And if the informant didn’t name him, surely that would have pointed to his innocence and the jury should have been told. We wanted to ask the police directly if Geoff was or wasn’t known to them before he turned up at the yard to help them into the office. We wanted to ask but the judge said we couldn’t. Why?
We’ll never know because the judge made his decision on the basis of a private conversation under what is known as a Public Interest Immunity order. These tricky little pieces of law were brought in to protect the identity of informants – to prevent anything being said in public that would point to their identity. It is the judge’s job to balance the potentially conflicting needs of having a fair trial and keeping the informant’s identity under wraps. But because the background to a PII order must by its nature remain secret, there is no way of us checking to see if our judge made the right decision.
Did he think that saying Geoff wasn’t named would somehow help identify the informant? And did he think that by having it possible for the jury to conclude that he wasn’t named would ensure he got a fair trial. Did he overestimate the jury’s ability to come to that conclusion? We’ll never know.