- Alistair Stephen Fabian Mitchell.jpg (289.47 KiB) Viewed 428 times
From his obituary in The Times newspaper, in March 2019:
'Private Eye once described Alistair Mitchell as "the only man in British legal history to be convicted of biting a policeman — with someone else's teeth".
His surreal, tortuous saga began on March 31, 1990. The 32-year-old Alistair, then a director of a wholefoods co-operative, had been asked by Alexandra, his girlfriend, to photograph the poll tax riots for a film she was making.
Shinning up a steel bus shelter, Alistair duly did so. He leapt off when a policeman struck the shelter with a baton.
He had been long separated from Alexandra when, at about 6.30pm, Alistair saw a police officer grip a protester by the neck in a chokehold that he had read could prove fatal. "That's dangerous," he cried out. "You could kill in eight seconds."
In response two police officers pinned Alistair against a nearby shop window, broke his right index finger, and gripped his windpipe. One of them shouted: "In six seconds you'll be dead." Unable to move, he fainted.
To his surprise, Alistair was subsequently charged with assaulting two police officers. According to The Guardian, when he was summoned before a magistrate to give his account, it tallied exactly with those of two eyewitnesses who were working in the shop against which he had been pressed by the police.
The novelist Maeve Binchy, a family friend, testified that, far from being violent in character, Alistair was "painfully honest" and "gentle".
A police officer then displayed bite marks on his left hand, saying that Alistair, "snapping like a dog", had bitten him. The dental expert who had made a mould of Alistair's teeth deemed this "highly unlikely". Speculation followed: could the officer have bitten his own hand ?
Although the question was left unanswered, Alistair was found guilty, fined £250 and sentenced to prison. When a judge upheld Alistair's sentence at appeal, a second, six-day incarceration followed at HM Prison Wandsworth.
Unable to sleep in a cell, Alistair found prison "strange and frightening". Nonetheless, it produced an unexpected consequence: he was asked to assist in founding a group offering legal help to some of the 500 protesters arrested during the poll tax riots, an event by then known as "the Battle of Trafalgar Square".
Assisted by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, Alistair helped to form the Trafalgar Square Defendants' Campaign. He held meetings to collect witness statements, arranged lawyers for defendants, and support for those in prison. Alexandra, meanwhile, logged the television news footage of the day. They developed a system of legal monitoring for use at demonstrations.
In 1993 the High Court quashed Alistair's conviction at judicial review. By then, his spare time being consumed by legal matters, Alistair decided to begin a law degree at South Bank (now London South Bank) University. The £40,000 Alistair won in 1997 in a civil action against the police would later pay for his studies for the Bar. As a barrister he initially specialised in family and criminal cases, later expanding into civil, immigration and commercial law. Whatever the lawsuit, the gentle Alistair was always happy to work with police officers ...'
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