To cries of ‘no, please no’, the court ruled that Barette (39) was right to have been found guilty of fiddling packhouse figures to short-change growers in the Island.
Between May and August in 2002 he deliberately gave false figures to Bel Farm Ltd as to the quantity of potatoes which the company had sold to the Jersey Produce Marketing Organisation Ltd.
In February this year he was found guilty by an Assize jury.
He was jailed for a year by the Royal Court and ordered to pay £10,000 costs.
However, following a three-day appeal in July, the Court of Appeal this week ruled that his conviction should not be overturned, although the court did reduce his sentence to nine months.
The three English judges presiding heard that a complaint had been made that one of the jurors on the trial had a history in farming and had family members still involved in the industry.
The court also heard a submission that the Bailiff, Sir Philip Bailhache, made an error in his summing up of the case to the jury.
The court rejected the submission regarding the juror, but agreed that the jury could have been ‘inadvertently misled’ by Sir Philip during his summing up.
In an unusual and rare move, the Court of Appeal then invited the advocates to comment on whether they believed the Bailiff’s mistakes were severe enough to warrant quashing the conviction.
After a day’s deliberating, the court decided that, although an error, the mistake was not substantial enough to affect the outcome of the trial.
