Wealdstone man's jail hell (From Harrow Times)

Wealdstone man's jail hell

4:26pm Wednesday 8th September 2004 in News By James Brockett

A WEALDSTONE man who was wrongly jailed for three years in a case of mistaken identity spoke for the first time of his ordeal - after losing a legal battle which leaves him financially ruined.

Chetan Popat, now 25, was a promising A-level student at Weald College eight years ago before his life changed forever. One day in 1996, a woman he had never met pointed him out to police as he walked down the street, claiming that he was the man who had tried to rape her. He found himself arrested and jailed, on counts of attempted rape and indecent assault. But two years into his eight-year sentence, he finally had his conviction quashed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and it was another year before he cleared his name.

Chetan said: "I was 17 when all this started, and still young. I definitely wasn't prepared for what was to come. Being inside was hard and painful and I don't like to talk about it, but the worst thing was being split up from my family. There was only one law book in the library there, by Archibold, and I kept on borrowing it - I always had it. I passed my GCSE and A-Level in law."

While Chetan was learning more about the law, his father was working tirelessly for his release. There were two grounds for appeal: that the judge had failed to instruct jurors correctly about his alibi, and that he should have been entitled to a identification parade rather than simply "street identification". The first issue proved decisive, and after a retrial in 1999 found him not guilty, Chetan was a free man.

But the experience has left its mark."Even though I say I'm over it, I am constantly reminded by things around me. When I meet new people who I get close to and trust, I feel like I just have to tell them about that part of my life. I'm 25 now and I've missed out on my youth. In some ways it has made me more serious than others my age, though at other times I just feel like letting go as if I was a little kid."

Since his release Chetan, who has six A-levels to his name, has completed a degree in Actuarial Science at City University. His dissertation, appropriately enough, was on "Probabilistic Evidence in Courts of Law". But his attempts to rebuild his life have now been hit by the end of another legal struggle - an attempt to sue his barrister at the original trial for negligence. Having lost this case, he has been ordered to pay opposition legal fees of £209,348, a bill which may bankrupt him.

But Chetan is keeping it in perspective."£200,000 would probably take me over 20 years to pay off. But when you compare it to being in prison, where you have lost your life, losing this civil case is nothing, only money - except money which I don't have of course. It's just disappointing rather than anything else."