Detective Sergeant Paul Williams, 53, a senior detective from a village near Newark has had two charges of computer misuse against him dropped after the Crown decided not to proceed with the charges.
DS Williams was accused of using a police computer to snoop on people in his village. In the first charge, DS Williams was alleged to have used the Nottinghamshire Police Intelligence System to gain unauthorised access to information between March 2008 and January 2012. The second charge related to computer misuse to gain unauthorised access to information about a man living in the village between December 2011 and January 2012.
The charges were dropped and Judge Andrew Hamilton entered not guilty verdicts on both counts after it emerged that DS Williams had sent an email to senior colleagues informing them of what he was doing. Adrian Keeling QC, defending, said DS Williams had sent an email to his bosses to say he had come across a record of a summons being served on the man referred to in the second charge, and informed them that he had come across the information when he had been checking on incidents in the Newark area, as he often did.
The Judge ordered DS Williams costs’ to be met from central funds, and said the last few months must have been an ordeal for him.
Read the story as reported by the Newark Advertiser.
