Sir Humphrey Potts; Obituaries.

SIR Humphrey Potts was a farmer's son from the North East who went on to become one of the country's best-known judges, presiding at a number of notable trials in the 1980s and 90s.

Born in Penshaw, near Sunderland, in 1931, Francis Humphrey Potts was the son of a tenant farmer who worked on the Lambton estate.

He attended the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, where his friends included Peter Taylor, the future Lord Chief Justice, and Geoffrey Bindman, the leading human rights solicitor.

After reading law at St Catherine's Society, Oxford, Mr Potts read for the Bar at Lincoln's Inn. He was called to the Bar in 1955 and entered chambers at Westgate Road, Newcastle, which Mr Taylor had joined the previous year.

Mr Potts did a mixture of criminal and civil work, much of the latter involving insurance claims or litigation against factories and the National Coal Board.

Along with Taylor and three other notable barristers based on Tyneside, he was one of a quintet known as the Lions of the North.

He became a QC in 1971 and moved to London.

He became a Recorder the following year and was then appointed as a judge of the High Court, Queen's Bench Division.

He served as presiding judge on the North Eastern Circuit from 1988 to 1991. He served as a judge in the High Court in London until 2001, with one of his last cases seeing him jail the Conservative politician Jeffrey Archer for perjury. Archer declined to give evidence but was found guilty by the jury and sentenced to four years' imprisonment for what Potts called "as serious an offence of perjury as I have had experience of and have been able to find in the books".

Archer later claimed that Sir Humphrey had been prejudiced against him from the start but when he appealed against his conviction, it took the Court of Appeal judges less than two minutes to reject it.

He was knighted in 1986 and had a stint as a barrister in Hong Kong during a long and colourful career.

In 1997 he became chairman of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission and invoked the wrath of some sections by branding two Sikh refugees as terrorists.

In 1999 he presided over Britain's first full war crimes trial, even holding part of it abroad. He made the historic decision to take the court to Belarus where retired British Rail ticket inspector Anthony Sawoniuk, 79, had murdered Jews during the Second World War. The killer got two life sentences in what was the first and only British trial under the War Crimes Act.

Sir Humphrey also presided over the arson trial in Newcastle in which Alan Ray was jailed for life for the murder of Lisa Dodgson, her two daughters and their teenage babysitter in a fire at a house in Scotswood, Newcastle.

And he was accused of forcing ice creams vans off the streets following a High Court battle when he ruled they were not exempt from PS500 street-trading licences.

Sir Humphrey's other high-profile cases on the bench included the 1992 libel trial in which the South African columnist Jani Allan failed to convince the High Court jury that she had not had an affair with the neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terre Blanche.

Sir Humphrey's other appointments included membership of the Mental Health Review Tribunal from 1984 until 1986, and the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in 1985-86. He was a member of the Parole Board from 1992 to 1995 and vice-chairman until 1996. He was the first chairman of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission from 1997 until 2001.

Away from the law, he was a keen traveller and enjoyed walking and gardening at his home in the Cheviots.

He married Philippa Margaret Campbell (nee Croke) in 1971. She survives him with their two sons and his two stepsons.

Editor's note: this article is being published again due to an error in last week's coverage.

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Title Annotation:	Features
Publication:	The Journal (Newcastle, England)
Geographic Code:	4EUUK
Date:	Jan 24, 2013
Words:	657
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