He has the blood of Trevor Morse on his hands and will have to live with that for the rest of his life. A very sad event that I am sure Bryan Griffiths regrets.
Any decent person would, but this pilot doesn't see it that way -
'given the fact he had been told several times to move out of the way, not only by myself and others, and had clearly been told the aircraft was going to take off, I feel that all the things that could have been done were done. I do not actually feel responsible.'
But I guess decent people wouldn't take this man flying:
The Times can reveal today that Mr Griffiths’s passenger was a convicted animal rights extremist. The jury was not told that John Curtin, 49 had been jailed for two years for planning to dig up the remains of the 10th Duke of Beaufort and send the head to the Princess Royal. His part in the 1980s plot was intended, he said, to give fox hunters, whom he called “blood junkies”, a “taste of their own violent medicine”.
Mr Curtin, who had led the campaigns at Huntingdon Life Sciences’ laboratories and was questioned by police in connection with robbing the grave of Gladys Hammond, a relative of owners of a farm breeding guinea-pigs for experiments, was the first to volunteer to sit in the back of the gyrocopter. A few months later the two took to the air together, dividing their time between the Warwickshire and neighbouring Haythrop hunts.
Easy to see why the defense didn't want the jury to know that.
I wonder if the jury would have been as sympathetic to the pilot's story if they had known.
heli-cal
I had no doubt that the pilot would be cleared, once the facts were known to the jury.
Good for you.
In the end, the jury weren't sure the pilot was guilty but it took them 7.5 hours to give him the benefit of the doubt.
He should sue for false arrest, imprisonment and malicious prosecution!
If you were able to look at the facts objectively you'd be able to see that the pilot has no grounds to sue for any of those things.
