Attn followers of the Johnny Depp v NGN and Wootton legal battle:

An early Christmas present for you. I think this is a world exclusive...

Mr Depp’s representatives have filed two documents to the Court of Appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice, London, England, seeking leave to appeal Mr Justice Nicol’s High Court ruling.

That ruling, handed down on 2 November this year found the Sun newspaper’s claims that Johnny Depp was a wife-beater to be “substantially true”.

At the time Mr Depp’s legal representatives described this decision as “perverse” and sought leave to appeal. That request was denied by the High Court, so Mr Depp has gone direct to the court of appeal.

He is seeking permission to appeal the judgment. If he is successful he says will ask the court of appeal to “set aside the Judgment and order a re-trial.”

The first document is the Grounds of Appeal, which is five pages long, followed by the Skeleton Argument, which is 23 pages long. The following tweet thread lays out most of the paragraphs from both documents.

I will make the full documents downloadable from my website ( http://www.nickwallis.com ) as soon as I get the chance.

To be clear, in the following docs, the Appellant is Johnny Depp, the Respondents are NGN (who own the Sun newspaper) and Dan Wootton, who wrote the original Sun newspaper piece.

Ready…? Here goes:

“IN THE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
BETWEEN:

JOHN CHRISTOPHER DEPP II (Appellant)
-and-
NEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD (1) DAN WOOTTON (2)
(Respondents)

[DON’T WORRY IT’S NOT ALL IN CAPS]

Nature of the Appeal

The Appellant seeks permission to appeal, and if granted, to set aside the decision of Mr Justice Nicol (“the trial Judge”) finding that the Respondents had proved that the defamatory allegations they published were substantially true.

It is recognised that the Appellate Court will be slow to set aside a trial judgment with findings of fact because of the greater ability which the trial Judge usually has to assess the witnesses whose evidence they are based on.

In this case the Court of Appeal should do so because the trial Judge failed to examine the evidence and the arguments with the care that the parties were entitled to expect and which a proper resolution of the issues demanded.

The judgment is plainly wrong and the consequential decision in favour of the Respondents is manifestly unsafe, because:

(a) the trial Judge’s findings were not conclusions based on or supported by a carefully weighed…

… and reasoned analysis of the evidence, or the credibility of the various witnesses, but rather bare assertions without any real explanation for how he reached these serious findings in the face of conflicting accounts of events, and

(b) he uncritically accepted at the outset that the complainant must have been correct in her allegations and, having done so, discounted or ignored any evidence to the contrary, despite the fact that it undermined her credibility and the account she had given.

Despite its length, the judgment lacks both analysis and reasoning for the trial Judge’s decisions to exclude matters which were damaging to or inconsistent with the evidence of the witness on whose veracity…

… or reliability the Respondents’ entire case depended (namely Ms Amber Heard), or as to why he made the findings of fact he did as to what he said happened.

In view of the unreasoned, inconsistent and unsustainable findings of fact in this judgment, the Appellant did not receive a fair trial in protection of his rights in accordance with both Article 6 and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human…

… Rights. Where allegations of serious criminal conduct are determined by a single judge, the importance of an effective appeal process is far greater.

Further, these findings have been reached in a judgment that has been very widely publicised, which is not only devastating to the Appellant but also has wider repercussions for alleged victims or those who are wrongly accused of domestic…

… violence. It is the result of a high-profile libel trial (one, which until relatively recently, would ordinarily have been determined by a jury) where the evidence and argument was closely followed and examined by the public as it proceeded.

This is therefore a paradigm example of a case where there are additionally compelling grounds for the judgment to be reviewed on appeal in any event, but particularly given the weight of reasons which render the findings that the trial Judge…

… reached plainly wrong or unsafe.


Grounds of Appeal

The judgment is plainly wrong and/or the trial Judge failed to examine the evidence and the arguments with the care that the parties were entitled to expect and which a proper resolution of the issues demanded for the following reasons, any one of which…

…would be sufficient to justify setting aside the decision in favour of the Respondents but which taken cumulatively render the judgment manifestly unsafe:

(1) The trial Judge’s findings of fact on issues of central importance amounted to bare assertions rather than reasoned decisions following upon a careful weighing-up and reasoned analysis of the evidence given by both sides.