"The day before, Father's Day, there had been 'an atmosphere' between the youngster and her father.
Mrs Jones said Danielle had not given her father a Father's Day card that Sunday, but she and her husband found one in their bedroom after she went missing."
"Resolving these cases as equations in this way fulfills the balancing act that is depicted in the symbolism that we use for courts of justice, namely the Scales of Justice, applying natural logic to the facts. The logic of the completed equation is irrefutable because it is mathematically correct, and any error that is made in the calculation can be seen and corrected afterwards.
The jury system was created with a unanimous verdict in mind, but in 1967 the 10-2 majority verdict was allowed, presumably to speed up cases in which the jury had difficulty, and this has degraded the integrity of our jury system. The problem with the majority verdict is that it allows the "mob" (or the lowest common denominator) of the jury to get past the intelligent conscience in it, when previously, the requirement of a unanimous verdict ensured that the "mob" of the group would eventually give out to the intelligent conscience in it."
The conviction of Danielle Jones's uncle Stuart Campbell for her murder was secured with evidence that included neither a body, nor a murder weapon, nor a murder scene, and with an assumption of murder that is based on a disappearance that is part of a series of similar murders. His pleas of innocence throughout have been repeatedly ignored.
During their investigation, the police questioned Campbell for sixty hours - the full legal allowance - twice, and two months apart. The first occasion was just five days after the disappearance, and the second arrest occurred two months later in August 2001, just when his bail was running out. The police charged him with murder at the very point when otherwise they must let him go. Throughout this period Campbell pleaded his innocence.
At each arrest the police announced to the press that they had received "significant" information in the case, which was followed by a worthless search of marshland in the neighbourhood in the first case, and a worthless search of Stuart Campbell's building site in the second. The second arrest occurred after two consecutive days of witnesses coming forward to claim that they had seen a blue van and a white man in his thirties connected with the disappearance, and just a day after the police had begun their search of his building site. Their behaviour shows that they did not get their alleged breakthroughs from their interrogation of Campbell or from any useful source, and that they charged him with murder simply because they were running out of time with him and wished to close the case.
Like Ian Huntley, Stuart Campbell was prosecuted for murder because he was the last person known to have had any contact with the missing girl, and, like Roy Whiting, he was charged because he had a van that resembled in colour a van that was seen by eyewitnesses at the time of her disappearance.
The evidence that the prosecution used against him consisted of two text messages that he had received from Danielle's mobile phone at around the time of her disappearance. The prosecution was based on the presumption that Danielle did not send these texts and that therefore the recipient had, and that he had access to her mobile phone at the time of her disappearance. These messages were transmitted on the day of her disappearance (18th June 2001) and the day after (19th June 2001). The first message ran:
"HI-YA STU WOT YOU UP IM IN SO MUCH TROUBLE AT MOMENT. EVONE HATES ME EVEN YOU WOT THE HELL HAVE I DONE Y WONT YOU JUST TELL ME. TEXT BCK PLEASE. DAN XXX."
The second, sent the day after her disappearance, ran:
"HI-YA STU. THANKS FOR BEING SO NICE, YOU ARE THE BEST UNCLE EVER TELL MUM I'M SO SORRY LUV YA LOADZ DAN XXX"
The first of these is written in stress and worry, the source of which is evident in the message, and the second is written flowingly and happily, the source of which is in the message. There is nothing in the wording or mood to suggest that anyone but Danielle herself wrote them. As far as this goes the texts look authentic.
In the first message there are two instances of three consecutive letters dropping out of the message. These occur in the letters "THE" in "AT THE MOMENT", and "ERY" in "EVERYONE". There is another instance of a drop-out in the case of a "TO". These drop-outs may be due to a technical fault in her mobile phone, or perhaps to her stress, which would confirm the authenticity of the message. The other drop-outs confirm that the missing "THE" was due to this technical fault. The second message has no such errors.
The prosecution case was that Danielle would not have written "AT MOMENT" without the "THE", and that she tended to write this phrase as "at the mo" instead. However, if she had dropped the "the" in her message, she would have needed to write the word "moment" in full in order to recover the sense in her communication. The prosecution also claimed that when she texted friends she spelt "What" as "WAT" instead of as "WOT". There is no evidence in these texts that Danielle's uncle had written them himself, but the prosecution argued that it was not likely that an abductor would bother to do it himself.
The prosecution case against her uncle was that because of these drop-outs, someone other than Danielle had written these messages, that this person must have been Campbell himself, and that he had done it to deflect suspicion from himself over the abduction. However this is not consistent with subsequent events, because these messages provided the prosecution with the only evidence that it had to connect him with the abduction. It is understood by the media that Campbell was charged on the strength of this evidence, but the pattern of events leading to the charge suggests otherwise.
The prosecution claimed that Danielle tended to text her friends with lower-case letters, but her phone defaulted on capital letters and these were used for these messages.
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