Word: loughan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Confession v. Alibi. When the details of the confession checked out in Portsmouth, Loughan was charged with murder. "I felt confident that I could not lose the case even if I conducted it standing on my head," recalls Joshua David Casswell, who was the prosecutor in the court proceedings that followed. But to Casswell's chagrin, Loughan dismissed his confession as the kind of casual lie he enjoyed telling the police, claimed he spent the night of the murder sheltered from the blitz in London's Warren Street subway station-and produced five independent witnesses to prove...
...retrial, Loughan was acquitted. He was still gloating when arrested on the steps of Old Bailey for another robbery and, after his 24th conviction, sent to prison for seven years...
That might have been the last anybody heard of little Harold Loughan if The People, a sensational London Sunday newspaper, had not printed the memoirs of Prosecutor Casswell. In one installment, Casswell claimed that Harold Loughan would have been convicted if all the evidence had been heard. Loughan, now 66 and in jail as usual, sued for libel, claiming he had been called a murderer despite his official innocence...
Murder or Libel. The newspaper's lawyer argued that even if the articles did amount to calling Loughan a murderer, truth is a defense against libel, and Casswell had finally shown that Loughan had indeed murdered Rose Robinson 19 years ago. For eleven days the jury heard evidence of the old murder-with Loughan still protesting his innocence. "You are asked to try again a murder in the guise of a libel action," his lawyer complained to the jury. Last week the jury returned its verdict: The People was not guilty of libel because Loughan was guilty...
...Loughan, of course, cannot be tried again for the same crime. If the jury was correct, he had cheated the gallows. But that was little comfort to Harold Loughan. After the trial he was returned to the prison hospital where, after spending 23 of his 66 years behind bars, he awaits death from inoperable cancer...