My song today is ‘The Black Velvet Band’. This is a traditional folk song which was reportedly collected from singers in Ireland, Australia, England, Canada, and the United State. The words of the song describe how a young man is tricked and then sentenced to transportation to Australia, a common punishment in the British Empire during the 19th century. There have been several versions of this song recorded; perhaps the most popular (at least by all Irish listeners) by ‘The Dubliners’ in 1967. Their song was based on a version sung by the traditional English singer Harry Cox. The narrator is a bound apprentice in a town (which varies in different versions).
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The song speaks to the worse side of human nature, whereby someone gains the affections of another who has feelings for them, before reverting to the practice of blaming the innocent party for something they never did, by allowing them to take the rap for some illegal act, to save one’s own skin.
On too many occasions during my 27-year career as a Probation Officer in West Yorkshire, I came to know of people getting sentenced for offences they never committed. The act of being framed always stinks, but more so when the person being set up is known by the person setting them up.
I am reasonably sure that the person I speak of today will have passed away now, but he was a detective in the police force whose wife/ partner worked in a service related to the Probation/Social Services/Caring Profession. I knew the wife of the detective but had only seen her husband in passing. One day while on duty at one of the county’s Crown Courts, I was sitting inside the court listening to the police officer’s testimony being placed before the sitting judge for his examination. I became more interested when I realised that the detective officer giving his account of the defendant’s arrest was the partner of my friend. I did not know him personally, but I had heard on the grapevine that he was certainly the type of police detective who would be tempted to manufacture evidence (even on sworn oath) to obtain a conviction if he believed the defendant as being guilty of what he was being charged with but could not prove it legitimately.
The detective was a police dog handler of a large German Alsatian breed used for tracking the scent of illegal drugs. The defendant in the trial had been charged with possession of drugs with a view of selling. He claimed that the drugs had been planted by the detective or his police colleague when they inspected his property. He also claimed that when he refused to be arrested, the detective had picked up his huge Alsatian in his hands and threw the dog towards the defendant’s face. Naturally, the detective denied each of the defendant’s claims as being preposterous.
The upshot was that nobody in the courtroom (including the judge), believed that any arresting officer would throw a huge Alsatian at a suspect, even were he able to physically pick up such a big dog? As both accounts of what really happened were significantly different, either the arresting detective or the defendant was telling an untruth. After the judge concluded that the dog-throwing incident was clearly untrue then the drug planting accusation by the defendant was also perceived ‘on probability’ of also being untrue. The defendant (who had previous convictions for drug use and supply) received two year’s imprisonment as his sentence. Had he and the police detective not had a bad history between them, the alleged drug planting and dog throwing incidents might never have taken place. This was the early 1970s and Crown Court Judges always believed the evidence put forward by the arresting police officer, especially when it conflicted with the defendant’s account of events. It was not uncommon for many a defendant to claim that they had been ‘fitted up’ by the cops. Neither was it uncommon for a defendant who had been arrested over the weekend, to be produced before the Magistrate’s Court on a Monday morning with bruises to the face and torso or wearing a black eye, having spent a weekend in the police cells.
How do I know that the detective in question fitted the defendant up by planting drugs at his home when arresting him, and then physically throwing his large dog at him? About six years later, his wife divorced her husband for physical and mental cruelty, and she told three or four of us after her decree absolute some of the lengths her ex-partner had been prepared to go to obtain a conviction. She even recalled one incident when she said the case revolved around his account of events or the account of the accused, and so he did something so preposterous, that cast instant doubt in the judge’s mind that the defendant was the one committing perjury, and not the police detective; he threw his dog at the accused!
He knew that nobody would believe the probability of such a story being true and that sheer scepticism would cast doubt on the remainder of the defendant’s testimony. I was the only person of the four of us (apart from the detective’s wife) who had any specific knowledge of the defendant in question. I never knew for sure if the arresting detective or his police buddy had planted an amount of drugs on the defendant’s property or had legitimately found the drugs in a proper search, but given what the detective’s ex-wife told us, I had no doubt that the dog-throwing incident had been a clever rouse to discredit the defendant’s total account of events.
Love and peace
Bill xxx