STRAW'S SON CAUTIONED IN DRUG CASE

Teenager Escapes Charges After Visit To Police Station With Home Secretary

THE teenage son of the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, was last night cautioned
by police for selling cannabis to an investigative reporter.

William Straw, 17, was told that he had escaped criminal charges when he
attended Kennington police station in London with his father.

Scotland Yard also disclosed that no further action would be taken against
the newspaper reporter Dawn Alford, who was arrested and bailed when she
attended a police interview last month.

A second youth, believed to be a 17-year-old friend of William Straw, who
was with him in the pub where the incident happened, has been told he will
also be cautioned by police.

Mr Straw will hope that last night's decision will draw a line under the
affair which has dragged on for three weeks, sometimes taking on farcical
dimensions.

When the Mirror newspaper broke the story on Christmas Eve, it did not name
Mr Straw or his son, citing legal reasons for not doing so. As the affair
dragged on, the name of the Cabinet minister involved began to leak out and
Mr Straw, anonymously, said that he had wanted to speak about the incident.

But he was identified only after The Scotsman and the Scottish Daily Mail,
which were not restricted by English law, named Mr Straw and the Attorney
General followed by dropping an injunction barring English newspapers from
doing the same.

Mr Straw last night appealed to the media to exercise continued restraint
in its coverage of the case. "William is now learning the lessons of this
episode and he of course has my support in doing so," he said.

"I am grateful for the restraint shown towards him by most of the media. I
hope that they will continue to agree that he should not suffer
additionally simply because he is my son, nor should my family."

William Straw is now 'learning the lessons of this episode', his father
said last night.

Piers Morgan, the editor of the Mirror, said Ms Alford had been "completely
exonerated" by the police decision to take no further action against her.
"It was a scandal that she was arrested for simply doing her job as an
experienced investigative reporter," he said.

"The fact that police have now decided not to proceed with the ludicrous
action against her indicates that they, belatedly, have realised how wrong
the arrest was in the first place."

He said transcripts of a tape of her meeting with William recorded by Ms
Alford clearly disproved any claims that the teenager had been entrapped by
the paper. "As we have maintained all along, any suggestion that he was
coerced into selling drugs against his natural will is unsustainable."

Mr Straw, who admitted he had been embarrassed by what had happened,
appears to have emerged from the affair unscathed politically, despite his
entrenched opposition to the legalisation of cannabis and his hardline on
the parents of unruly children.

William has been told by Oxford University that his place to study at New
College next year is safe.

The decision to caution him means that he will not acquire a criminal
record although details will be kept by Kennington police station.

Harry Fletcher, the assistant general secretary of the National Association
of Probation Officers, said it would not be unusual to caution someone in
William's situation.

"A young person, first time offender from a stable home supplying a small
amount of cannabis would almost certainly be cautioned," he said. "But the
extraordinary circumstances of this case where it is a law minister's son,
and the involvement of journalists, make it difficult to call.

"I was expecting them not to proceed with it so I would say this was
towards the top end of the spectrum."

Mark Stephens, a senior partner in a London law firm, said he was not
surprised by the outcome. "It seems to me there would be no possibility of
a successful prosecution in this case," he said. "The chain of custody of
the drugs was broken."

The difficulty, he said, was proving that the substance which was handed
over to the journalist outside the pub was the same that was later sent to
the laboratory for analysis.

In a police station, any suspected drugs would be immediately put in a
sealed bag and labelled in front of a witness before being sent off. He
added: "William Straw has admitted what the prosecution could not have
proved. A caution is an admission of guilt and what happens now is that he
will be given an even bigger dressing down than his father probably gave
him by a senior officer."

A Scottish law expert said yesterday that a 17-year old charged with the
same offence as William Straw would face similar treatment in the Scottish
courts.

Professor Peter Young, of Edinburgh University, said: "Although there is no
formal system of police cautioning in Scotland, I believe that the
procurator-fiscal would take a lenient view if it was a first offence. The
fiscal could offer a fixed penalty of around 50UKP as an alternative or
simply issue a warning to the person concerned."