John Berry

John Berry was convicted on 24 May 1983 of an offence under section 4 of the Explosive Substances Act 1883, namely the making of a number of electronic timers in such circumstances as gave rise to a reasonable suspicion that they were not made for a lawful object. After a reference by the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction on 28 September 1993. The decision is reported at R v Berry (No.3) [1995] 1 WLR 7.

Trial

At the trial the Crown had alleged that the timers were designed and intended for use by terrorists to construct time bombs but Mr Berry claimed they had been supplied to the Syrian government and that they had numerous uses including for landing lights.

Of the four grounds argued before the Court of Appeal, the most relevant to Mr Feraday’s involvement in the trial was that relating to fresh evidence. It was agreed that Mr Feraday’s evidence had effectively been unchallenged at trial, as the only defence expert had accepted that he lacked experience in terrorist weaponry. It was Mr Feraday’s testimony that the timers made by Mr Berry could have been designed only for use by terrorists to cause explosions and as such it was critical to the conviction. He excluded non-explosive uses such as surveillance and lighting and suggested that legitimate armies would not use such timers because of the lack of an inbuilt safety device.

Appeal

However, the Court of Appeal heard fresh evidence from four experts, including Major Lewis and Dr Michael Scott, and stated that each of them disagreed with Mr Feraday’s "extremely dogmatic conclusion" about the timers, which they each felt were timers and nothing more, and which could be put to a variety of uses. In particular, whereas the absence of an inbuilt safety device in the timers might exclude their use by Western armies, the same could not be said of armies in the Middle East. Accordingly the verdict could not be considered safe.

Feraday banned

On 28 September 1993, Alan Feraday’s career prospects suddenly appeared to be in tatters when, in overturning John Berry's conviction, England's most senior judge, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Taylor of Gosforth, commented that although Feraday's views were "no doubt honestly held", his evidence had been expressed in terms that were "dogmatic in the extreme" and his conclusions were "uncompromising and incriminating". LCJ Taylor went even further saying that in future Feraday should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics. In 1995, Alan Feraday saw the writing on the wall and, aged 58, took early retirement after 25 years' service at the FEL when RARDE was subsumed into the less regal-sounding Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA).