Guilty Of Unlawful Entry

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 24

Guilty Of Unlawful Entry

A young man who had denied entering a Worcester street boarding-house with intent to steal, and had asked to go on an identification parade, was found guilty by a jury in the Supreme Court yesterday. The accused, Robert Thomas Webster, aged 20, an unemployed workman (Mr L. M. O’Reilly), was remanded by Mr Justice Wilson for sentence on June 24.

The Crown’s case, led by Mr C. M. Roper, was that Webster was a party to an unlawful entry of a room in the boarding-house, from which a £99 television set and a brown rug were stolen. It was alleged that Webster entered through a window, or assisted someone else to do so. The evidence against him, given by Pamela May Cleall, a psychiatric nurse, was that in the mid-afternoon of March 25 he was seen, with two other men, to get out of a car driven into a car park next to the boarding-house, and 10 minutes later return with one man, carrying something under a brown rug.

Miss Cleall said she noticed Webster because she had seen him several times before although, cross-examined, said she did not know where or when.

After first identifying Webster from a number of photographs shown to her by the

police, she picked him out at an identification parade, she said.

Addressing the jury, Mr O’Reilly suggested that Miss Cleall. having admitted there were many possible points of identification on which she "didn’t know,” or "hadn’t taken much notice,” could easily have been mistaken. Yet the whole case had proceeded on the basis that her identification was correct. The jury deliberated for an hour and a quarter before returning a verdict against Webster.