advertisement
Sat, May 26 2012
Fair cop?
IN: On December 2 2009, Australian Paul ‘Jock’ Palfreeman was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment after being found guilty of the first-degree murder of Bulgarian law student Andrei Monov in 2007.
Photo: Georgi Kozhouharov
OUT: Liverpool football club fan Michael Shields, who was convicted in Bulgaria in 2005 of attacking Bulgarian bartender Martin Georgiev during a street brawl, was happy to leave Thorn Cross Young Offenders Institute in Warrington, northern England, on September 9 2009.
Shield?
At the beginning of 2009, Michael Shields was still in a UK jail, pronounced guilty of a violent attack on a Bulgarian barman. By the end of the year, he was free and almost supernaturally slimmed down from the pudgy young man arrested more than four years previously. Shields had also "penned" a memoir of his incarceration which he had always claimed was based simply on mistaken identity.
Shields was convicted in Bulgaria in July 2005 of attacking Martin Georgiev during a street brawl in Golden Sands. Georgiev, who was hit with a concrete slab, required several operations; fortunately, four years later, he has reportedly returned to work.
Shields was later transferred to a British prison to finish his 10-year sentence. From the beginning, Shields had always insisted that he had played no part in the late-night brawl and was in bed at the time of the incident. Another Liverpool man, Graham Sankey, later said that he had carried out the attack but then withdrew this statement. Meanwhile,
Shields alleged that he had been mistreated while in custody. Throughout 2009 pressure mounted on UK justice secretary Jack Straw who had the prerogative of deciding Shields’ fate. On July 2 2009, Straw declined a pardon for Shields. In a "provisional" ruling, he said he was unable to conclude that the 22-year-old was "morally and technically innocent".
Shields’ supporters, who by now included prominent politicians, clergymen, Liverpool football club, local media and celebrities, vowed to fight on. The cumulative clamour seemed to work; on September 9 2009, Straw pardoned Shields, although the basis for his decision perplexed observers.
In a statement, Straw said that during his last meeting with the Shields family, on August 28 2009, "important new evidence" had emerged in which he was apparently told of a visit by two members of the Shields family to the home of another man alleged to be responsible for the crime. "I was told that in the course of the visit that man made an oral confession to the crime in front of several other people," said Straw.
Media pundits in the UK wondered how Straw could have reached a decision based on hearsay. Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, in particular, questioned Straw’s logic. "I can’t see how an alleged oral confession during a private meeting with the Shields family trumps a written admission of guilt issued through a lawyer," he wrote. Littlejohn said that Bulgaria would be within its rights to seek the extradition of the individual implicated by the supposed "new evidence".
As things stand, Shields is free but so is the man who initially admitted the attack. The UK’s Daily Mail reported that Sankey refused to open the door of his home in the Norris Green area of Liverpool. Sankey apparently said: "I’m not interested - I don’t care what people think about me."
Shields, meanwhile, according to an interview in the Independent early in the New Year, is still hoping to receive a formal apology from the Bulgarian and British authorities for what Shields sees as his wrongful imprisonment.
At the beginning of 2009, Michael Shields was still in a UK jail, pronounced guilty of a violent attack on a Bulgarian barman. By the end of the year, he was free and almost supernaturally slimmed down from the pudgy young man arrested more than four years previously. Shields had also "penned" a memoir of his incarceration which he had always claimed was based simply on mistaken identity.
Shields was convicted in Bulgaria in July 2005 of attacking Martin Georgiev during a street brawl in Golden Sands. Georgiev, who was hit with a concrete slab, required several operations; fortunately, four years later, he has reportedly returned to work.
Shields was later transferred to a British prison to finish his 10-year sentence. From the beginning, Shields had always insisted that he had played no part in the late-night brawl and was in bed at the time of the incident. Another Liverpool man, Graham Sankey, later said that he had carried out the attack but then withdrew this statement. Meanwhile,
Shields alleged that he had been mistreated while in custody. Throughout 2009 pressure mounted on UK justice secretary Jack Straw who had the prerogative of deciding Shields’ fate. On July 2 2009, Straw declined a pardon for Shields. In a "provisional" ruling, he said he was unable to conclude that the 22-year-old was "morally and technically innocent".
Shields’ supporters, who by now included prominent politicians, clergymen, Liverpool football club, local media and celebrities, vowed to fight on. The cumulative clamour seemed to work; on September 9 2009, Straw pardoned Shields, although the basis for his decision perplexed observers.
In a statement, Straw said that during his last meeting with the Shields family, on August 28 2009, "important new evidence" had emerged in which he was apparently told of a visit by two members of the Shields family to the home of another man alleged to be responsible for the crime. "I was told that in the course of the visit that man made an oral confession to the crime in front of several other people," said Straw.
Media pundits in the UK wondered how Straw could have reached a decision based on hearsay. Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, in particular, questioned Straw’s logic. "I can’t see how an alleged oral confession during a private meeting with the Shields family trumps a written admission of guilt issued through a lawyer," he wrote. Littlejohn said that Bulgaria would be within its rights to seek the extradition of the individual implicated by the supposed "new evidence".
As things stand, Shields is free but so is the man who initially admitted the attack. The UK’s Daily Mail reported that Sankey refused to open the door of his home in the Norris Green area of Liverpool. Sankey apparently said: "I’m not interested - I don’t care what people think about me."
Shields, meanwhile, according to an interview in the Independent early in the New Year, is still hoping to receive a formal apology from the Bulgarian and British authorities for what Shields sees as his wrongful imprisonment.
12
-
Print
-
Send via email
- Translate to
-
Share:
Comments
To post comments, please, Login or Register.
Please read the The Sofia Echo forum comments policy.
A year of elections
The Borissov juggernaut thundered into power, and served thin pizza
A year of controversies
Bulgaria spent its third year as an EU member fighting its own shortcomings
Hamstrung by recession
Despite the tripartite coalition government keeping their collective fingers crossed, economic recession reached Bulgaria early in 2009
Happy New Year, we’ll be hearing you
IT in Bulgaria in 2009 was mostly equivalent with attempts at mass access to personal data.
The once and future Emerging Europe
Snapshots of 14 Central and Eastern European countries as the dawn of 2010 found them
More in this category
Going online
The Sofia Echo settles in cyberspace.
Echoes of a newspaper
A fond memoir of the life and times of a certain English-language publication.
Revisit a classic from 30 years ago
Film almost inspired bone-idle journalist to start jogging.
Winds of change
Russia's revolution of the well-fed, well-dressed and well-informed.
Friendly faces
Your Facebook friends have more friends than you and other surprising findings from a new Facebook study.
© 2000-2012, Sofia Echo Media Ltd.
Web Design by RIZN
Sofia Echo Media is part of the Economedia Group.
The news and information content on this website is provided by our editorial team and is copyrighted.
Any unauthorised reproduction or use of it is strictly forbidden. Reproduction of this website's content is permitted only
with prior written permission from the Editor-in-Chief, should be propertly acredited and provide an active link back to our site.
Comments posted by the website's visitors are independent of the editorial materials and do not represent the views of sofiaecho.com.
Sofia Echo Media cannot be held responsible for the statements contained in visitor comments.
The percentаge change in the shares' prices are based on the price of the last transaction of the current session compared to the
price of the last transaction of the previous session. Bulgarian Stock Exchange data is not real-time, but updated every 15 minutes,
and should not be used as a basis for decisions about buying or selling stock options.
- Economedia Group portfolio:
- In Bulgarian:
-
Business:
Капитал,
Кариери,
Пазари,
Ho Re Mag,
Регал,
Градът.bg,
Одит,
Foton.bg,
Online shop
- News: Дневник, Европа, Foreign Policy - България
- IT: IDG.BG, Computerworld, PC World, CIO, Networkworld
- Entertainment: Бакхус
-
In English:
The Sofia Echo
According to an interview Palfreeman gave to Gabriel Hershman of the Sofia Echo, one of the arresting police officers said to Palfreeman: ‘Why did you do this? You’re a good boy. Roma is monkey. White boy should not be friends with monkey.’ This priceless piece of advice must have made Palfreeman wonder how his defence of the monkey/Roma would go down with the Bulgarian justice system. As it turned out, they mostly shared the non-multicultural beliefs of the cop. If the Roma didn't exist it's hard to understand why the cop went to so much trouble to explain why they [...]
Read the full comment were monkeys and why white boys should not be friends with them.
The Judge’s “Statement of Reasonings” on the verdict also refers to the CCTV footage:
“Disks were not immediately seized with recordings from the cameras located in the building of Ministry of Health and holding within their scope the accident (sic) site. This is one of the most serious deficiencies of the investigation because later when the body of the investigation (presumably the police) had finally acted to gain access to these disks, for not entirely clear reasons, even now, the information on them WAS REMOVED and later the whole computer configuration had been changed” (p. 9, “Judge’s Statement’).
But if we read the court testimony of Viktor Georgiev,who worked for the security company VIP Security at the Sheraton Hotel and witnessed the entire event, (close enough to hear that Palfreeman was speaking English to his attackers when he got up off the ground) we can get a good idea of why this footage disappeared:
"Someone hit him on the head with a rock or some object and he fell down." Viktor Georgiev
“After a minute we noticed a boy (Palfreeman) running in the opposite direction from Vitosha Boulevard towards the underground” he testified. “We saw the same group (Monov’s group) chasing him… they pulled him to the ground and started hitting him. I mean kicking him…he was waving the knife and was trying to pull back towards the underground.”
This is completely different to the version that the court accepted and on which the guilty verdict was based: that Palfreeman attacked Monov’s group with “hooligan’s motives”, that his actions were “inexplicable” and that Monov’s group had offered no violence to him. The fact that he was trying to “pull back towards the underground” means that Palfreeman was attempting to escape his attackers and according to Georgiev’s eyewitness testimony was not the aggressor. Georgiev also saw Palfreeman struck on the head with a rock or other object and knocked to the ground and he describes in further testimony the way in which Monov’s group “surrounded” Palfreeman to prevent his escape. The story used in the trial was in complete opposition to the facts and evidence was destroyed, altered and ignored to get a guilty verdict. The sentence is grotesque but then so was the charge of premeditated murder. Palfreeman is a victim of Sofia's fascist underbelly and those conducting his trial have themselves flagrantly violated the law in order to rig his trial.
This comment has been removed by the moderator because it contained off-topic content
1. Why was Jock carrying a knife? Its not as if he hadnt already been in trouble with the police for stabbing someone...
2. Parents here in Australia "pressure the system". Its called victim impact statements.
3. Jocks case might look better if the victim had not been stabbed in the back. Nice one Jock, just defending yourself were you????
Let the maniac die in jail. He isnt safe to be let out.
Valeri obviously isn't a parent (thank goodness) & is obviously not a well person & one would assume is on medication & maybe needs to have his prescriptions reviewed. Not a nice person at all.
"The conditions for everyone, Bulgarian and foreign are deplorable in Bulgarian prisons."
All the more incentives not to go around stabbing folks....
Jock will be very happy... Pray say - what does it matter what conditions are like, if there is LOVE?:)
The conditions for everyone, Bulgarian and foreign are deplorable in Bulgarian prisons. Not even enough food is provided to live. See my story about spending a few weeks in one:
http://www.kudzuworld.com/Help/bulgaria.aspx
Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit Valeri.
Valeri comments about Jock are those of an uneducated person. Valeri needs to go to Church and learn to be a human. His remarks are nasty and if he lived in a civilized country he would be charged with a hate crime. Shame..Shame.
btw, I don't mean to be cold hearted... I truly hope he'll find real love... in our prison.
I understand he is found of Roma... frankly, a good looking blond, Matt Damon look-a-like will be quite popular with our Roma prison population... may the strongest win....
Well, he is Australian and he did stab (for a second time if you count the incident in Australia) so that would make him Australian stabber, wouldn't it?
I haven't been able to take 'reporting' such as this seriously ever since you and your fellow Bulgarian media decided to label him 'the Australian stabber'. Objective stuff, as always.