Juror Faces Jail After Being Convicted of Taking £5,000 Bribe to Acquit UK Drug Dealer

Witness who lied on oath winked to corrupt juror as he gave evidence

Damien Drackley—a juror on trial for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice—arrives at the Old Bailey, London, on Dec. 8, 2022. (PA)

Four people have been convicted of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, including a juror who was paid £5,000 to try and influence others on the jury and gain an acquittal for a drug dealer.

During a trial that ended on Thursday, the Old Bailey heard Leslie Allen, 66, was a major drugs kingpin in the city of Coventry in the English Midlands.

Allen made a “concerted attempt” to evade justice before his trial, for possession of £150,000 worth of cocaine and cannabis and possession of a pepper spray weapon, at Warwick Crown Court in 2018.

He paid £5,000 to Damien Drackley, 37, who had been selected to sit on the jury at the trial, hoping he would not only vote not guilty but cajole others in the jury to acquit Allen.

In an almost unprecedented case, three other jurors testified at the Old Bailey trial about Drackley’s behaviour in the jury room.

Usually, in English courtrooms, what is said and done in the jury room is sacrosanct and judges, lawyers, and journalists are forbidden from delving into it but in this case an exception was made in order to investigate Drackley.

Prosecutor Tony Badenoch, KC, told The Epoch Times: “I certainly cannot remember a case before where three jurors have given evidence.”

Allen also persuaded Laurence Hayden, 53, and Daniel Porter—who has since died—to give false evidence at the trial and used Mark Walker, 57, as his intermediary.

Hayden, who was nicknamed Del Boy after David Jason’s character in the TV sitcom Only Fools And Horses, winked at Drackley from the witness box after swearing to tell the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

On Thursday, Drackley, Hayden, Allen, and Walker were all convicted of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Drackley’s mother, Lorraine Frisby, has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Allen’s attempts to evade justice failed and he was jailed for 13 years by a different jury at a retrial.

In his opening statement to the Old Bailey trial, Badenoch described the jury at the Warwick Crown Court, as “Twelve randomly selected members of the public responding to their jury summons, having been randomly selected from the electoral roll.”

He said: “Each juror was vetted in the sense that they were asked a series of questions to ensure that they didn’t bring any prior knowledge to the case of the relevant area or the persons concerned.”

Jurors Became Suspicious

Badenoch said: “The case progressed to the jury hearing all the evidence, counsel’s submissions, and summing up. In support of his case, Leslie Allen called two witnesses: Laurence Hayden and Daniel Porter. The prosecution case both at the first trial and now is that those two men were effectively ‘stooges’ for Leslie Allen.”

Badenoch said when the jury retired to consider their verdicts they were told to turn off their mobile phones but Drackley did not comply.

Fellow juror Dominyk Maggs told the Old Bailey that Drackley had been aggressively arguing for Allen’s acquittal.

Maggs said: “He basically said that it was all made up, it was a complete load of rubbish, the prosecution, none of it made sense, none of the facts made sense so (Allen) was not guilty.”

Maggs said the following day Drackley said he believed Allen was not guilty and “nothing is going to change my mind.”

“He pulled his hood up and slumped in his chair and said he was not participating any more,” said Maggs.

One of the other jurors became suspicious of Drackley when he began to comment on the evidence as if he knew two places that were at the centre of the case, despite claiming to have never been there.

The jury foreman sent a note to the judge, who then discharged Drackley from the jury. But other jurors thought he may have been using his mobile phone to record their deliberations because it had been making noises in the jury room.

App Recording Conversations

Badenoch said the court usher took the decision to present Drackley’s phone to the trial judge, Justice Anthony Lockhart KC, who ordered an investigation.

Badenoch said: “Overnight, the phone was interrogated to ascertain whether the juror’s hunch of his recording deliberations was right. In fact, it wasn’t, Damien Drackley hadn’t been recording deliberations as suspected. But he did have installed on his phone an app which recorded all his conversations, including those with ... his mother.”

These conversations eventually led to Walker and then to Allen and revealed the whole conspiracy.

Earlier this week Drackley, giving evidence, said it was a “shock” when Hayden winked at him when he was giving evidence at Allen’s trial.

He said his mother, Lorraine Frisby, then phoned Walker and later told her son: “I just had Mr. Allen on the phone.”

Drackley, who worked on the assembly line at a car factory, said: “At the time I was like ‘of course you have.’ I did not believe her but did not disbelieve her because it’s my mum. If she says something, I’m supposed to believe it, but at the same time it’s rubbish.”

All five will be sentenced next month.

PA Media contributed to this report.