Cases
In 1975, he defended a then-18-year-old Stephen Fry at his trial for credit card fraud. Popplewell and his wife had long been friends of Fry's parents. Stephen Fry writes about the event in his autobiography Moab Is My Washpot.
Following the fire at Valley Parade, the Bradford City stadium, on 11 May 1985, Popplewell was chosen to chair an inquiry held under the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975. Following this inquiry, he was chosen to chair a Committee of Inquiry into Crowd Safety at Sports Grounds. In 1999, he donated the papers of the inquiry to the University of Bradford.
A copy of the Committee of Inquiry into Crowd Safety and Control at Sports Grounds' Interim Report has been published online in PDF format by the Bradford City Fire website.
He presided over the libel case brought by Jonathan Aitken against The Guardian and Granada Television.
While presiding over the High Court case brought by the athlete Linford Christie against former criminal John McVicar, the editor of Spike magazine, he was widely reported as asking, "What is Linford's lunchbox?". He later claimed that this was intended as a joke. The question was in the tradition of British jurisprudence, in which the judge asks seemingly inane questions relevant to the facts of the case on the assumption that the jury, which cannot ask questions, is ignorant of them. Following this case, the name "Mr Justice Cocklecarrot" was revived by Private Eye magazine (it was originally the name of a character in the Beachcomber column in the Daily Express) which became the magazine's generic name for unworldly and out-of-touch judges, though Popplewell asserts that this description did not apply to him.
He upheld Reynold's privilege, established in the House of Lords in Reynolds v Times Newspapers in 1999, in an action against the Yorkshire Post for reporting that a local karate company was selling "rip-off" lessons.
Since he retired, Popplewell has spoken up for the right of judges to impose the sentences they see fit. He had an argument with Home Secretary David Blunkett who was seeking to introduce mandatory minimum sentences for some serious crimes.
Read more about this topic: Oliver Popplewell
Famous quotes containing the word cases:
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