Chief Coroner is exposed as Pedophile apologist who wanted age of consent to be 14 in UK

A second senior judge can be revealed today as a campaigner for the rights of members of a vile paedophile group that tried to legalise sex with children.

Peter Thornton, the Chief Coroner for England and Wales, publicly declared that his campaign group ‘supported the civil liberties of everyone including paedophiles’.

A Mail on Sunday investigation has discovered that he openly criticised the prosecution of the infamous Paedophile Information Exchange, even after its leader was jailed at the Old Bailey.

 

Defence: Peter Thornton, the Chief Coroner for England and Wales, publicly declared that his campaign group 'supported the civil liberties of everyone including paedophiles'

And he wrote that he backed a ‘reduction in the age of consent for both homosexuals and heterosexuals to 14’ when he ran a high-profile civil liberties organisation. Documents uncovered by this newspaper show that Mr Thornton, then a barrister, also defended one of the vile child sex campaigners in court.

The news follows our revelations last week that an Appeal Court judge Lord Justice Fulford was a founder of a support group for PIE members ahead of their prosecution. And today it can be revealed that Fulford also represented a PIE leader at the Old Bailey more than ten years after his initial involvement in the campaign.

 

While a barrister, Peter Thornton (pictured) represented PIE's Peter Bremner at his trial. He said he had a professional obligation to accept any brief

The new details will put further pressure on Labour grandees Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman and Jack Dromey, who were all leading figures in the National Council for Civil Liberties when Thornton was its chairman.

They have insisted the paedophiles who joined the group had been marginalised by the late 1970s, but Mr Thornton was still defending their rights in NCCL’s newsletters as late as 1983.

Last night the former Old Bailey judge, 67, said he did not recall supporting a lower age of consent or representing a PIE leader, and expressed regret that paedophile activists were linked to the NCCL for so long.

There are growing calls for a full investigation into the influence of PIE, which openly campaigned for the age of consent to be lowered to just four, and which received invaluable help from some on the Left.

Peter Saunders, of the National Association For People Abused In Childhood, said: ‘Shame on the NCCL for ever going down this route. Everybody has always known that paedophiles want to harm children.

‘This strengthens our call for a Royal Commission into this whole murky affair – there are clearly many Establishment figures involved.’

Documents uncovered by The Mail on Sunday reveal for the first time the role played by Mr Thornton in defending PIE. He attacked the prosecution months after PIE was described in court as a ‘force for evil’, and its chairman Tom O’Carroll was jailed for two years for the rare offence of conspiracy to corrupt public morals.

Mr Thornton wrote that the case was an ‘expensive and largely unsuccessful’ attempt to revive the ancient law, ‘dangerous not only for the defendant at risk of a prison sentence but also for the prosecutor at risk of exposure for vindictiveness’.

In a lengthy article published in the NCCL’s newsletter, Rights, in November 1981, he claimed that although PIE members ‘had been sending pretty unattractive porn to each other’, police could not nail the organisers for what they wrongly believed to be an ‘introduction to sex with children racket’.

  

The PIE members were accused of trying to arrange sex with children through contact adverts, but Mr Thornton said their defence was that they were ‘lonely, isolated paedophiles getting in touch with others similarly cut-off from society by their emotional and sexual orientation’.

He concluded the charge against PIE had been ‘vague, wordy, above all too remote from any tangible misdemeanour’. Mr Thornton added, however, that ‘child molesters and other sexual offenders should unquestionably be brought to account for specific offences under our extensive protective legislation’.

This prompted a self-confessed paedophile to write to the magazine complaining that Thornton had not done enough to defend his rights. Mr Thornton wrote back in the spring 1983 issue to apologise for offending the paedophile and to insist that the NCCL – now known as Liberty – did have a radical stance on sexual law.

He wrote: ‘Our policy… is to seek a reduction in the age of consent for both homosexuals and heterosexuals to 14. My remarks were not intended to infringe upon these proposals; nor were they intended to offend, and if they did I regret it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk