Fare trial guaranteed? ‘Big Man’ faces charges over train eviction

By ANDREW WHITAKER
Published on Thursday 22 December 2011 11:42

IT WAS an event captured on video and viewed online by almost two million people around the world.

And few of those who saw the passenger dubbed “Big Man” eject an alleged fare dodger from a train could have failed to take a view on whether or not he was right.

But now the man at the centre of the incident, which has become a YouTube sensation, is facing trial after he was charged with assault. He is understood to be Alan Pollock.

The student accused of fare dodging, 19-year-old Sam Main from Falkirk, has been reported to the procurator fiscal service in connection with an allegation of trespass.

The start of legal proceedings against the pair yesterday led senior Tory MSP David McLetchie, a lawyer by profession, to declare that a warning letter to Mr Pollock from Stirling “would suffice” rather than the move to prosecute him.

Meanwhile, a senior Scottish legal figure said there would be “evidential difficulties” during the trial, with the presiding sheriff unable to have the “necessary detachment” to deal with the case, due it becoming an internet sensation. Video footage of the incident shows one man muscling another male passenger off an Edinburgh-to-Perth train.

The video starts with the conductor asking a man to leave, telling him: “I can sit here all night. I’m getting paid for this but these folk will start moaning: not at me, at you. Why should they pay and you no?”

The footage shows a man swearing and saying he has paid, but he is told he only has a single ticket for the other direction.

Another passenger then steps in and asks the conductor: “Do you want me to get him off for you?” before he appears to grab the other man by the shoulders and move him to the door and on to the platform.

Fellow passengers are shown to be applauding the ejection from the train, while a man tries to get back on the train but has his way barred.

A police spokesman said: “British Transport Police can now confirm that a 35-year-old man from Stirling and a 19-year-old man from Falkirk are the subject of a report to the local procurator fiscal in connection with an incident on board the 9:33pm Edinburgh Waverley to Perth service, at Linlithgow on Friday 9 December 2011.”

Scottish Tory justice spokesman Mr McLetchie said the case had “polarised opinion” across Scotland and that any trial was “unlikely to please everyone”.

He said: “This may be a case where a warning letter to Mr Pollock would suffice and draw a line under the matter.”

Bill Aitken, a former district court judge a a former Tory MSP, warned that the widespread coverage of the incident made a fair trial difficult, as well as raising issues about the law of contempt. He said: “There are evidential difficulties, when half of Scotland has seen the episode on the internet. It’s difficult to see how there can be the necessary detachment on the part of the person hearing the case.”

Glasgow-based solicitor Aamer Anwar, a lawyer for former Socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan in the high-profile perjury trial, said some juries in the most serious cases should be kept from contact “with the outside world” because of the amount of internet publicity surrounding cases.

He said: “There’s increasing concern about material posted on the internet and even where a jury has been instructed by the judge not to look at the material they can just do so in their own time.

“In the old days juries had no contact with the outside world and perhaps in serious cases that may be the only way forward.”

However, Austin Lafferty, another Glasgow solicitor, claimed that it was almost certain that the “Big Man” trial would be dealt with as a summary offence by a sheriff without a jury, who he claimed would “deal with the evidence dispassionately and objectively”.

He said the release of material about crimes before prosecution was the normal process, as he insisted that the authorities could not “stop publication because there’s a chance that there might be a prosecution”.

A Crown Office spokesman said: “The procurator fiscal at Livingston has received reports concerning two males in connection with an incident in Linlithgow. The reports remain under consideration.”

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  IT IS difficult to remember a case that has captured the Scottish public’s imagination more in the past three months than the summary removal of an alleged fare-dodger from a Perth-bound train.

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