hendry_fan wrote:The other thing that i find very interesting is,....if the EVIDENCE against Lee is so incriminating,how on earth will he be able to show otherwise and show that he,s innocent?!.
The simple answer is that he won't be able to!
I find it hard to believe that Stephen Lee has said that he is going to appeal his guilty verdict.
Is he totally naive? Is he some kind if Walter Mitty character who lives in a pretend world of his own imagination? Is he just plain stupid? Or is he an actual villain. Maybe he's mixture of all four. Or maybe he's something else entirely. Who knows?
However, regarding any appeal he tries to make, I'm sorry to dash the hopes of any Stephen Lee fans reading this. But, after having read the judgment against Stephen Lee, I have to say that it is virtually
IMPOSSIBLE that he could win an appeal. And I cannot understand why Stephen Lee does not seem to realize this. If Stephen Lee appeals his guilty verdict it is pretty much
100% certain that he will lose once again.
I personally believe that Stephen Lee is as guilty as sin! But, even if he was NOT actually guilty, the
only way he could win an appeal would be to provide evidence that actually
refutes the evidence against him.
This is because of the way civil cases work. To win a civil case you don't have to prove that someone is "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" like you would need to do in a criminal case. To win a civil case you only have to show evidence that it's
"more likely" that they are guilty than they are innocent. This criterion for determining guilt or innocence is known as
"the balance of probabilities test." (Re B [2008] UKHL 35 per Lord Hoffmann.) We don't need to worry about the exact wording of this "balance of probabilities test". But it means that, in effect, if a Judge, or a Magistrate, or in this case Adam Lewis QC, thinks the chances of someone being guilty is 51%, and the chances of them being innocent is 49%, then he has the legal obligation to find them
guilty.
So, with this in mind, let's completely ignore all the
"suspicious betting patterns" evidence, and also ignore all the text message and phone call
"collusion" evidence. And let's just have a look at a couple of paragraphs of the judgment which detail what Stephen Lee said about any payments he received:
"The WPBSA pointed out that if Mr Lee wished to make the case that all the payments, which on their face were very odd and appeared designed to conceal, were in fact simple distributions of the money that he was entitled to from his career as a professional snooker player, he could be expected to produce the records of his wife’s account and the management accounts of Mr Clague, and make good the paper trail. The fact that he refused to do this suggested strongly that those documents would not support his assertions.""If it had been true that all payments could be attributed to distribution of his earnings by his manager, to sponsorship payments, to referral payments, or to the payment of a loan, then one could expect to have seen documentary and witness evidence to account for the payments. Instead, Mr Lee has refused to provide such documents."As you can see from the bold text above, Stephen Lee
refused to provide certain documents. And this prompted Adam Lewis QC to say that Stephen Lee's refusal to do this suggested strongly that those documents would not support his assertions.
If you are innocent, and you have documents which may be able to
prove your innocence, then why would you refuse to provide such documents?
Seriously, how does this make Stephen Lee look? Obviously just refusing to provide those documents
alone already makes him look as guilty as sin!
And if we also look at all the circumstantial
"suspicious betting patterns" evidence and all the circumstantial text message and phone call
"collusion" evidence, how is Stephen Lee going to look after taking all that extra evidence into account as well? It doesn't take a genius to realize that he is going to look
even more guilty.
Basically, in a civil case, if the evidence against you makes you
look guilty. Then you make yourself
look even more guilty by refusing to provide documents which may refute this evidence. Then,
on the balance of probabilities, that is
ample evidence to find that you
are guilty!
It said on the World Snooker website that Stephen Lee changed his legal team three times before deciding to go into the hearing without legal representation. I cannot believe that, during Stephen Lee's time with those three different legal teams, that they would have failed to tell him how civil cases work. Surely they must have told him!
So I have no idea why Stephen Lee would have gone into that hearing and protested his innocence in the way he did. Taking into account the way civil cases work, the way Stephen Lee presented his case gave him literally a
ZERO chance of winning. Frankly, I find the whole thing incredible!
Anyway, going back to Stephen Lee's decision to appeal the judgment. If Stephen Lee does try to appeal the judgment, then the appeal Judge is going to read the previous guilty judgment.
And what is that appeal Judge going to want to see? He is going to want to see every single document that Stephen Lee refused to provide at his previous hearing.
If Stephen Lee again refuses to provide those documents, he will once again
on the balance of probabilities be found guilty.
And, if by some miracle, Stephen Lee
does provide all those documents, they will be scrutinized by expert legal minds who will find every single discrepancy in them. And then, if Stephen Lee cannot explain any discrepancies pretty much perfectly, he will once again
on the balance of probabilities be found guilty. (But, in reality, this point is completely moot. He won't produce these documents. Because, if these documents did provide any "proof of innocence", even the daftest person would obviously have produced them at the earlier hearing.)
Maybe it's also possible that Stephen Lee might be daft enough to try to concoct a different cock-and-bull story for his appeal than the one he used in his previous hearing. If he does do this, then the appeal Judge will say to him something along the lines of
"This is a different story to the one you gave in your previous hearing. Were you lying then, or are you lying now? Or were you lying in your previous hearing and now also lying again in this appeal hearing? If Stephen Lee does come up with a new story, whatever it is, he will be seen as having
definitely lied in at least one hearing, and
possibly lied in both hearings. Therefore, as a proven liar and an unreliable witness, he will once again
on the balance of probabilities be found guilty.
Honestly, the way civil cases work is not rocket science. And
ANY lawyer in the entire country would explain how civil cases work to Stephen Lee if he paid them to do it.
Also,
ANY lawyer in the entire country would also explain to Stephen Lee that, if he appeals the decision and loses, he will be hit with another legal costs bill which will probably be as least as much, if not more, than the £40,000 he has already been ordered to pay. And he also stands a chance of getting an
even longer ban than the one he already has. (We all know that lengthening the ban would make no difference anyway. He's not going to start playing again at the age of 50. But sometimes Judges like to set an example and send a message which basically says
"You stood in my courtroom and tried to take me for an idiot Here is your extra punishment".
Furthermore, due to cutbacks in Legal Aid, the fact that Stephen Lee already has numerous unpaid CCJs against him, and the fact that he also now owes World Snooker £40,000, I doubt that even the scummiest of lawyers (the ones who will happily pursue completely un-winnable cases as long as they are getting paid) would even agree to take on his appeal case without being paid in advance. And, from the number of unpaid CCJs that he has against him, Stephen Lee does not seem to be the type of person who is keen on paying for
anything in advance. So, if Stephen Lee
is actually daft enough to try to appeal the judgment, he might have to represent himself again. And, this time, he will have to represent himself in a courtroom in front of a High Court Judge. Honestly, that kind of thing hardly ever ends well, even if you are a totally switched-on kind of person. So God only knows how someone like Stephen Lee would get on in that kind of situation. I think "not very well" might be a bit of an understatement. lol.
Anyway, to sum up, I believe that we have basically heard the last of Stephen Lee, at least in regards to snooker.
It wouldn't surprise me if he tried to make five or ten grand by selling some kind of hyped-up snooker "expose" story to the Daily Star or some other sensationalist paper. And I doubt that he will be concerned about any potential damage that this may cause to the game from which he earned about two million pounds, or to the potential livelihoods of his former fellow snooker professionals.
Then maybe he will try his luck on the pool circuit, if they will have him.
I don't know what he's going to do now. But, whatever it is, it
definitely won't be successfully appealing his guilty verdict.LOL. I've just read this post back and realized how long it is. Sorry about that. But I tend to get a bit carried away when I've got a bee in my bonnet about something.
