Lawyer jailed for faking email in child custody case

A leading London barrister has been jailed for attempting to pervert the course of justice by elaborately faking an email in a child custody case for one of his clients.

Bruce Hyman, who is also a scriptwriter and produced the radio version of Douglas Adams' cult classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was jailed for 12 months at Bristol Crown Court but will be released on parole after six months.

Last September, he was representing a woman who was fighting for custody of her four-year-old daughter. Hyman sent the girl's father an email purporting to be from a pressure group for father's rights, that appeared to support the father's claim that he should be granted greater access to his daughter. Then, when the father presented it in court in Taunton, Mr Hyman accused him of forgery.

Unfortunately for Mr Hyman, the father conducted his own private investigation and found CCTV footage of the lawyer sending the email, and Mr Hyman was subsequently arrested.

In August, the father in question who cannot be named, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I did some research on the Net about tracking emails and tracked the ones I had been sent to an internet posting service in Manchester."

"They released the number of the internet shop on Tottenham Court Road," he said. "I called the shop and, within five or six hours, they emailed me saying staff had recalled a gentleman coming into the store on the day the emails were sent. He'd not bought anything but had asked to use their internet services. They then said they'd got him on CCTV and sent me some stills. I nearly fell off my chair."

"Its extraordinary to me on a human level, its unprecedented on a legal level and it's astonishing on any respect," the father added.