Judge criticises surgeon Peter Brooks’ ‘cynical’ trial-delaying tactics
A total of nine trial dates were set before Dr Peter Brooks was eventually convicted of attempting to murder Graeme Perks.
Dr Peter Brooks frustrated justice for more than four years by claiming insanity, refusing to have surgery on a fractured jaw, and staging repeated “desperately bleak” hunger strikes.
The 61-year-old plastic surgeon also declined to see a psychiatrist while in prison and repeatedly shunned court hearings, meaning seven of his nine scheduled trials failed to even start before a jury.
In a legal saga stretching from his arrest while asleep in a garden during a Covid lockdown on January 14 2021 until his conviction by a jury on April 7 2025, Brooks put forward a variety of possible defences, including a lack of intent to kill or endanger lives, and even self-defence.
Brooks, who cycled to his victim Graeme Perks’ home in Halam, Nottinghamshire, dressed in camouflage gear while equipped with petrol, matches, a lighter, nitrile gloves, a knife and a crowbar, insisted all the items had been “stored in his garage and had been acquired for innocent purposes”.
The surgeon’s final trial was told he smashed conservatory doors to spread petrol around the ground floor of Mr Perks’ house and then stabbed him in the abdomen.
Brooks, then of Landseer Road, Southwell, Nottinghamshire, was facing an online NHS disciplinary hearing which started on January 11 2021.
His trial was told he had made an unsuccessful bid to postpone the hearing a day before trying to kill Mr Perks, who was a witness in the proceedings.
In a legal ruling issued at the start of Brooks’ final trial at Leicester Crown Court, sitting at Loughborough Courthouse, a venue chosen because it had wheelchair access, Mr Justice Pepperall gave prosecutors the go-ahead to proceed in the burns specialist’s absence.
The judge told counsel in the trial, including prosecutor Tracy Ayling KC, that he had been informed Brooks would not be attending and was in a “hunger strike situation”.
Summarising a doctor’s report on Brooks, who was on remand at HMP Bedford before he was moved to HMP Norwich, Mr Justice Pepperall told the court the defendant was refusing any food and “only takes sips of water with medication”.
Brooks also had very low blood pressure, with a doctor said to be very concerned about a cardiac event.
“He is currently only able to lie down flat on his bed,” the judge said.
“She (the doctor) has made an inquiry as to whether he can attend court on a bed.”
The judge, who asked counsel if they could point towards any previous hearing providing case law dealing with a hunger strike situation, added that Brooks was “plainly a highly intelligent man and there is nothing to suggest that he lacks (mental) capacity”.
In his ruling allowing the case to go ahead in Brooks’ absence, Mr Justice Pepperall referenced the impact on court proceedings of hunger strikes by Red Army Faction terror suspects in West Germany in the 1970s and an International Criminal Court defendant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Ruling that there was no reason to delay Brooks’ ninth scheduled trial, Mr Justice Pepperall stated: “Dr Brooks’ case is that his mental health was ‘on the edge’; after years of deterioration.
“He blames the sustained and deliberate use of disciplinary processes to drive him out of his NHS trust or to make him insane so that he could be dismissed.
“He claims that he was hypothermic after the cycle ride in wintry weather. He denies any recollection of events and asserts that amnesia could have been caused by hypothermia.”
The judge added: “Upon this account, Dr Brooks has no recollection as to the circumstances of the stabbing itself.
“His plea of self-defence is dependent upon his rationalisation of other evidence.”
Observing that the prosecution of Brooks had been listed for trial nine times at “enormous” public cost, and had disrupted an overstretched criminal justice system, the judge added: “There is, in my judgment, an enormous public interest in these proceedings finally being tried.
“There is a very strong public interest in not allowing a defendant who has deliberately made himself ill to succeed in his attempt to force the court to adjourn his trial.
“The courts cannot countenance the adjournment of cases on the grounds of illness caused by the fully informed and deliberate actions of a defendant with capacity to engage in a dangerous hunger strike while also dismissing his lawyers in a cynical attempt to manipulate the forensic process.”
