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Deaths in Custody

Change now - before any more bereaved families face this struggle for truth

Liberty's report 'Deaths in Custody - reform and redress'
published Monday March 31st 2003

The investigation of deaths in custody desperately needs radical reform. Today Liberty, along with people whose relatives died in police custody and who have struggled for years since to find the truth, calls on the Government to overhaul the entire system from initial investigation, through coroners' courts and on to other remedies. And it argues, in new research published today, that the current system clearly breaches the right to life as enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

On the day that the Government's Coroners Review Team is due to report, with other reviews and inquiries still examining the roles of CPS, death certification etc, Liberty's report Deaths in Custody - reform and redress lays out the flaws in the system ands makes 21 key recommendations for change. These include:

- breaking the dominant link with the police in investigations - especially those where people died in contacts with the police themselves

- investigating every death in custody as a possible homicide - to avoid some of the damaging early errors of past cases
- investigating all custody deaths independently - whether they involve the police, prisons, secure hospitals or other forms of compulsory detention

Changes to the coroners' courts, to rights of representation and appeal for families, and to the key decision processes on whether officers involved should be prosecuted also all feature.

Christopher Alder's death in 1998 led - after a lengthy fight - to the prosecution of five police officers. The trial collapsed in 2002. The case is now bound for the European Court; this month, the police re-opened disciplinary proceedings against five officers involved. At the launch today, Christopher's sister Janet said:

"Tomorrow it's five years to the day since Christopher died in police custody .. what still remains is the numerous unanswered questions and the lack of explanations by any agency. ... Until truth, transparency and admission are given, there are going to be more deaths in police custody, more deaths in prison, more deaths in psychiatric hospital". On her brother's case, where hours of videotape of his death in a police custody suite are still being withheld from the family, she said simply: "I challenge them [the police and CPS] to release the video to the family" so the public can decide whether anything went wrong.

Christopher Edwards' death and his parents' eight-year battle for the truth and for justice culminated in their historic European Court victory last year, which found the UK in breach of its Article 2 duty to protect Christopher's life and to investigate fully after his death.

Today, his mother Audrey Edwards said:

"As the mother of a young man who died in prison, I very much welcome this report". She described how "The official legal process of police investigation, inquest and trial had run its course but none of those involved [in the death] had been called as witnesses to be questioned in public, and as a result we knew virtually nothing".

She also criticised Essex police, whose "secretive, self protective approach has been consistent throughout, starting from refusal to release copies of statements ... through refusing to allow some key officers to appear before the multi-agency inquiry, to refusing to release copies of the PCA report. Nor were we reassured by the role of the PCA itself which appeared to give higher priority to negotiating an agreement with Essex Police than to revealing the full facts of what happened"
"The European Court ruled last year that not only had Christopher been denied his right to life but that we had been denied our right to both an effective investigation into Christopher's death and a remedy through the UK legal system ... We sincerely trust that the Government is now giving urgent thought to changing the nature of investigations into deaths in custody to overcome the defects the European Court found in our case. This new Liberty report should be accepted as a valuable input into this process of review".

John Wadham, director of Liberty, said of the agencies involved in deaths in custody:

"There is too often a defensive posture instead of a search for the truth; there are agencies using legal means to prevent disclosure of documents which could be disclosed ... We hope people will take away the findings of this report, and that it will help achieve some positive change, so we won't hear such terrible stories in another five years' time".

The report was published on Monday 31st March with a launch at Matrix Chambers. It was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and the Civil Liberties Trust. The Advisory Board overseeing the research included representatives from the Police Complaints Authority, Association of Chief Police Officers, Police Federation, Home Office, Crown Prosecution Service, Prison Service, Inquest and other key organisations, plus notable lawyers and academics. The Committee was chaired by Vera Baird, QC MP.

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Police pay £40,000 damages
Vikram Dodd
The Guardian Thursday April 24, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,...,942293,00.html

A black man who was sprayed with CS spray and arrested by police after pleading for protection from a gang of marauding racist skinheads, has won £40,000 in damages.

Francisco Borg, 22, sued police for wrongful arrest, malicious prosecution, false imprisonment and assault.

Yesterday at Cardiff county court South Wales police agreed a settlement, admitting liability for false imprisonment and "the consequential technical issue of assault".

Police had charged Mr Borg after the incident, but later dropped the charges.

Mr Borg and a friend were attacked by the gang in Cardiff in August 1997. He asked an officer for help and told him he had been assaulted. The officer told him to stay in a car and radioed for backup.

But the skinheads reappeared screaming racial abuse and surrounded the car.

Mr Borg said he and his friend had fled the car, only to be arrested by the police.

He told the court: "We thought they were there to help us but they turned, and attacked us and arrested us."

A police spokesman said there was no admission of negligence, malicious prosecution or that excessive force was used in the arrest.

Arresting officer PC Simon Williams admitted in his evidence that part of a previous statement contained incorrect information.

Mr Borg said no officer had expressed any sympathy that he and his friend had been attacked or showed that they understood the pair had been victims of a racial attack.

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Abuse Bail - Go to Jail

Home Office press release Wednesday 13th May 2003

Defendants who fail to turn up in court or who offend while out on bail should face immediate custody, Home Secretary David Blunkett said today, announcing a crackdown on those who abuse bail.

In a radical reversal of the provisions of the Bail Act, the Government will introduce a presumption against bail for defendants charged with an imprisonable offence who are brought back to court having failed to appear. It would also apply to those charged with an imprisonable offence committed while out on bail.

The move will be coupled with a drive across criminal justice agencies to target defendants who fail to turn up in court, including a greater focus on warrant enforcement by the police and a determination on the part of the CPS to prosecute Bail Act offences. Ways are also being examined of promoting more consistent practice in dealing with such offenders promptly.

Mr Blunkett, who tomorrow addresses the Police Federation Annual Conference, said:

"Nearly a quarter of defendants offend while on bail and one in eight fails to turn up in court. This leads to ineffective trials, delays that frustrate victims and witnesses, wasted time and resources and undermines public confidence in the criminal justice system.

"We will send a clear signal to those who abuse bail - either by trying to evade justice or by committing crime - that they will risk being imprisoned, whether or not they are convicted of the main offence with which they are charged.

"We believe the measure will act as a deterrent and will have a significant impact on defendants' behaviour, as well as providing an incentive to the police to improve the enforcement of court warrants as they know action will be taken."

The changes to the Bail Act are being introduced through an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill tabled today and build on reforms already in the Bill to tighten up bail. Practical guidance to improve warrant enforcement has been issued to all criminal justice agencies through the Local Criminal Justice Boards set up across England and Wales on 1 April.

The Home Secretary said a tough approach to those who commit offences against the Bail Act was also supported by the courts, citing guidance issued by the Court of Appeal in December which made clear those who fail to surrender to bail should expect a custodial sentence.

Courts have been quick to respond to the Court of Appeal's guidance. In January this year a judge in Liverpool referred to the guidance when giving a defendant a three month sentence for Bail Act offences, even though the original charge or robbery was dropped.

The Home Secretary said:

"The number of defendants who fail to turn up in court, and the fact that many of them go unpunished, was a problem highlighted by the Street Crime Initiative. The success of the Street Crime Initiative also taught us that we need to work in partnership across the criminal justice system if issues are to be effectively tackled.

"We must all - Government, police, prosecutors and courts - make it clear that attendance in court is not optional, and that the criminal justice system is serious about dealing effectively with crime and bringing more offenders to justice."

Notes to Editors:

1. The Government today tabled the amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which will be debated at report stage in the Commons on 19 May.

2. A decision of the Court of Appeal in December 2002 ( R v White and McKinnon) made clear that those found guilty of failing to surrender to bail should be sentenced, and should normally be given a custodial sentence, and that it should normally be served consecutively to the main sentence.

3. In a case at Liverpool Crown Court in January 2003 (R v Robert Bentley) Judge Mark Brown referred to the new guidance from the Court of Appeal and pronounced a sentence of three months imprisonment for Bail Act offences even though the original charge of robbery was dropped.

4. The Criminal Justice Bill already includes measures to toughen bail:

Clause 16 creates a presumption that, where a defendant is charged with an imprisonable offence, he tests positive for a specified Class A drug which appears to have contributed to the offence, and he refuses treatment (or to be assessed for treatment), bail will not be granted unless there are exceptional circumstances.
The existing right of the prosecution to appeal to the Crown Court against a decision by magistrates to grant bail is extended by Clause 15 to cover all imprisonable offences, and not just those carrying a maximum penalty of 5 years as at present.

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Criminal 'Injustice' Bill

"the victims of miscarriages of justice under the present system get no mention and, hence, appear to have been sacrificed in the interests of the battle over law and order"

The Criminal Justice Bill and the apparent sacrifice of the victims of miscarriages of justice
The arguments that underpin the proposed reforms in the criminal justice bill that was debated in the House of Commons this week are completely unfounded. They are also grounded in a poor and one-sided image of the form of harm that the present criminal justice system causes. Indeed, the victims of miscarriages of justice under the present system get no mention and, hence, appear to have been sacrificed in the interests of the battle over law and order and the increased conviction of guilty offenders.

In the debate about the proposed reforms so far, there has been much speculation that measures such as the end of the 'double jeopardy' rule; the restriction of the right to elect a jury trial for certain cases; the revelation of previous criminal records, and so on, will erode civil liberties, undermine key procedural safeguards and, thus, result in miscarriages of justice.

There has been less attention, however, on the crucial matter of the victims of miscarriages of justice under the present system and any possible steps that could be taken to reduce their number. This is somewhat surprising for a reform agenda framed in a language of 'putting the victim first' with an 'absolute determination' to 'acquit the innocent.' Indeed, for Tony Blair the planned reforms will constitute something of a 'victim's justice bill.'

At the same time, however, and seemingly in direct contradiction with the commitment to safeguard against wrongful convictions, the reforms are said to have a 'single clear priority' to and to 'bring more offenders to justice.' This is said to be necessary because the present system is 'ineffectual' in convicting the guilty. The explicit goal, then, would seem to be to make it easier for the prosecution to secure guilty verdicts and to convict more people.

An immediate problem with this is that it would seem to be at odds with the reality of criminal justice in England and Wales. The prosecution already achieves the conviction of over 95 per cent of defendants at magistrates' courts where in excess of 98 per cent of criminal trials are currently conducted. Moreover, over 87 per cent of defendants in the Crown Court where the remaining two per cent of cases are heard are also found guilty.

This is not to deny the possibility that guilty offenders are not being brought to justice. Rather, it is to emphasise the point that once criminal suspects have been arrested and/or charged the overwhelming outcome is a criminal conviction. This calls into question any notion that the present judicial system is ineffectual in obtaining guilty verdicts. At the same time, it indicates that if, indeed, not enough guilty offenders are not being brought to justice the problem lies with the police system in terms of an ineffectuality to detect crime and arrest and charge guilty offenders and make them answer their offences in court. In such a context, there seems to be no justification whatsoever with the proposed abolition of safeguards such as the double-jeopardy rule, jury trials and the restriction of previous criminal records.

Perhaps an even more significant limitation with the argument for the reform of the criminal justice system, however, is that victims are seen solely in the very narrow context as 'victims of crime' who are harmed by an ineffectual system when criminal offenders are not brought to book. This emphasises a very one-sided depiction of the victims of the present system. For it denies even the possibility that at least some people will be victims of wrongful conviction under the present system. This fails to acknowledge the fact that any human system can make mistakes, and that miscarriages of justice can and do occur.

Alternatively, if analyses of possible victims were premised on the straightforward definition that a 'victim' is any person who is harmed in some way by the criminal justice process, then, victims of miscarriages of justice would also need to feature prominently in any proposed reforms.

As this translates into the number of miscarriages of justice that are currently occurring, between 31 March 1997, when the Criminal Cases Review Commission started handling casework, and October 2001, 36 cases were successfully quashed in the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) after referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Over roughly the same period, however, the CACD quashed over 982 criminal convictions from the Crown Court. In addition to these successful appeals in the CACD, between 1998-2000 (inclusive) there was an annual average of 3,546 quashed convictions at the Crown Court for criminal convictions that were given by magistrates' courts. If this average is added to the CACD annual average then an official picture of England and Wales' miscarriage of justice problem, or the number of times that the system itself acknowledges a wrongful conviction, rises to an annual average of over 3,750 cases.

In addition to the neglect of the scale of wrongful convictions under the present system, however, the forms of harm that the victims of the criminal justice system experience is also insufficiently accounted for in the argument that underscores the proposed reforms as advocated in the criminal justice bill. As indicated, victims are entirely defined as victims of crime to whom the main form of harm is conceived as a psychological feeling of being 'left in the dark' and/or frustrated about the progress of the case against the criminal offender.

Without wishing to undermine the seriousness of the troubling psychological effects to victims of crime when they are not informed of the fate of their offenders, the problem with this is that it omits an extensive range of social, psychological, physical and financial harm to victims of wrongful convictions.

These include the helplessness of victims of wrongful imprisonment when they are absent from their children's upbringing as in the cases of Paddy Hill's (Birmingham Six) and Michael O' Brien (Cardiff Newsagent Three); they include the post-traumatic stress suffered by many victims of miscarriages of justice still present many years after they have successfully overturned their wrongful convictions as in the cases of Gerry Conlon and Paul Hill (Guildford Four); they include the variety of forms of state torture that was officially acknowledged in the successful appeals of Keith Twitchell, George Lewis and Pat Molloy (Bridgewater Four); and, they include the estimated £180 million per annum that is currently being spent on miscarriages of justice that impact upon other important aspects of public spending and, thus, affect us all.

In such a context, it seems abundantly clear that the present system of criminal justice is, indeed, in urgent need of reform. But this is would not be the direction of a relaxation of the system in favour of obtaining more guilty verdicts and convicting more people. Rather, the present system needs to a reformed in the direction of 'rebalancing' it with its equally stated aim to safeguard against the current over conviction of the innocent. For, if the Government really is committed to 'rebalancing' the criminal justice system in favour of victims and 'winning the trust of citizens', as it contends, it needs to ensure that the harm caused to the many thousands of victims of miscarriages of justice is reduced. For to blindly crash on with the aim of convicting more of those brought to trial will, undoubtedly, mean making even more mistakes and sacrificing even more innocent victims.
Dr Michael Naughton
ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Sociology
University of Bristol
12 Woodland Road
Bristol
BS8 1UQ
Office: 0117 928 7965
Mobile: 07890 125 092
M.Naughton@bristol.ac.uk

Whenever a politician extols the virtues of our wonderful judicial system, in the same breath condemning that of such luminaries as Saddam Hussein, it is sobering to read such as this.
It's one of many cases. The state really doesn't care about individuals. The fate of people like Karl is in our hands.
Email the CCRC and ask why Karl is still in jail.


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Testimony of Karl Watson
On the night of 18 December 1991 the body of Mr Shippey was discovered in the boot of his burnt out car. During the course of the polices investigation I was arrested on suspicion of Murder, along with many others. I was released when it was established that at the relevant times I had an Alibi, either I was with police after being involved in a motorway crash or I was with my family.
In September 1992 of the following year Bruce Cousins was arrested for other crimes but the police question him over the murder of Mr Shippey. At first he denied any knowledge of the crime but later he changed his story after a search of his flat and the discovery of a 'script' in which he stated that he was involved in the murder. He gave the police another statement and was charged with the murder, he claimed that 'he had been made to do it by Karl Watson'.
When I heard this accusation I cut short my family holiday and returned to England. I contacted my solicitor and asked him to make arrangements to surrender myself to the police to deal with the matter. The police turned down the offer. Then in April I was arrested and charged with the murder. At the same time the murder charge on Cousins was dropped.
I was convicted and sentenced with a recommendation that I serve a minimum of 20 years. The case was based entirely on the evidence of Cousins. At that time the police did tell my QC that in their opinion Cousins had lied throughout his evidence and out of revenge I should give evidence against Cousins.
Shortly after the conviction it became apparent that the Crown had failed to disclose documentary evidence that directly undermined the credibility of Cousins namely a psychological report which was prepared for the CPS whilst Cousins was on remand in HMP Belmarsh hospital for the murder. The CPS assured my defence that they had never had sight of this report, so the defence took the view that a case of non-disclosure could not be proved.
An Appeal was held based on new evidence, which was provided by four men that Cousins had spent time with. They stated that Cousins had told them fantastic stories and also that Watson was not the murderer. The Appeal was predetermined as the judges retired for 2.45mins and then came back with a judgement that would have taken at least three quarters of an hour to type. Basically, the Lord Chef Justice stated that the witnesses testimony lacked credibility because "each of the witnesses was at the relevant time not only in prison but in a prison hospital which does not always give the greatest encouragement to the view that they will be reliable witnesses" Throughout Cousins 11 months remand he was held in the same prison hospitals. Common sense would dictate that following judges reasoning, the credibility of Cousins evidence must also be questionable, but the fact that the crowns witness was a patient was not disclosed to the my defence or for the benefit of the jury.
In July 1997 a submission to the CCRC was submitted. This submission was based on new evidence that confirmed that the CPS had misled or lied to the defence when it stated that they had not had any knowledge of the Psychological report on Cousins and had failed to disclose to the defence. The defence had come into possession of another report from Dr O'Bryne who was employed at HMP Belmarsh to the CPS dated 3 February 1993. The psychiatrist report states that she was very concerned that Mr Cousins may be easily led in terms of statements and would have a major bearing on his case". The reason for her writing this report was to seek CPS authorisation for a psychological assessment of Mr Cousins. This document had two CPS stamps on it that proved without doubt that they had knowledge of Cousins condition.
This report was authorised and on the 17th March 1993 a report was prepared by Psychologist Jackie Craissati The report was opened by stating "This report is prepared for the Crown Prosecution Service". As a result of her clinical tests Ms Craissati states "This indicates that his anxiety is such, that he will change nearly all his answers, regardless for his memory for the facts". It is hard to imagine a more devastating assessment of someone as a witness, is it coincidence that this report is faxed to the Crown shortly by the murder charge against Cousins was dropped providing he give QE testimony against m^

Cousins statements would have been inadmissible if the crown had pursued the murder case against Cousins, certainly the reports would have become public knowledge.
Obviously, had the Watson defence known of this material they would have been able, for example; to call expert witnesses to undermine Cousins, or they could have made an application to challenge the admissibility of Cousins evidence, or utilised the material to cross-examine Cousins. All of which should have been adduced by the jury, as is the correct process of Law, instead the Crown acted as judge and jury in their own cause.
Repeatedly, my defence made it clear that they would require a copy of the trial transcript to enable them to present a full and proper submission based on fact and not guess work. This is the recognised stance taken by the European Courts, the House of Lords and the Appeal Court, who each state that to judge the relevance of new evidence that material has to be in context to the transcript of the trial. Evidence without context is ambiguous at best.
Predictably despite the assurances of the CCRC in 1997 that all relevant documentation was being secured it later transpired that efforts were not made until September 1999, by which time all copies of the trial transcript had been destroyed. We were told this on 30th October 2000, six weeks after the CCRC decision to reject our application. The question that begs an answer is, if all the higher courts and the defence require a trial transcript to judge the relevance of new evidence, then how did the CCRC possibly make a reasoned decision with no knowledge, at all, of the trial? After all it is the 'trial process' that I am challenging.
Even the trial judge felt it necessary to refer to the trial transcript during her summing-up stating "again we will, I think, need the transcript at some stage". This was after the jury had just heard the evidence in fact the judge referred to the transcript in excess of 20 times for the juries benefit that is recorded. Imagine the substantial disadvantage the new defence had been in ten years on, the CCRC must be clairvoyant.
The second CCRC application, drew the commissions attention to their lack of diligence during their previous 'review' and that there were a number of witnesses that the police had interviewed but they had neglected to disclose to the Watson defence. One witness was interviewed at his house. He gave little if no evidence that was of help to the prosecution but gave evidence which would have been of great assistance to the defence, seriously undermining Cousins credibility. The police told him that they were very busy so they would return the following week to take a statement, they never returned. He did get a visit just before the trial and was told not to get involved. This man was later confronted by Cousins after the trial and Cousins told him 'it was him or me, I had no choice... the police said it was him so it must have been... I didn't set him up, they wanted it to be him. He smiled, then said, it suits me' and walked off. At a later date Cousins and another pursued this man in a car and ran him off the road.
Another witness was named by Cousins as being involved but to a lesser degree. The police took him into a port-a-cabin behind a police station to intimidated him and threaten him with imprisonment if he didn't help. His interview again undermined Cousins credibility, at a later date his property was searched demonstrating the polices interest. Yet this material was never disclosed to my defence.
In June 2002 the CCRC sent a copy of the trial judges summing up, the importance of the question of Cousins suggestibility, as indicated by the non-disclosed reports, becomes more apparent. On page 79 G-H, Judge Nina Lowry stated, 'This was all agreed with suggestions put (to Cousins by counsel). / Then the judge stated 'This is really the words of counsel which he (Cousins) adopts. Would the judge have made such comments if she had sight of the reports, at the very least she would have felt compelled to comment on suggestibility and it's relevance.

The applicant finds a reference to another Psychiatric report that has not been disclosed, again it appears that DC Edwards is involved as this report was sent direct to him from Cousins solicitor in March 95. In August 2002 the CPS sent this document, dated 9th December 1992, following my request, it stated 'Cousins is an extremely vulnerable individual with low IQ and few coping strategies... he is requiring a high dose of anti-depress ants'. This is at the time that the deal was done with the police and CPS.
This case needs a proper independent investigation as there are also various other matters that the police had failed to disclose to the defence
Following a complaint to the CCRC over their indifference and or negligence which resulted in the destruction of the trial transcript, they informed me that despite being a publicly funded body they are not bound by ECHR Article 6, the right to a fair hearing but though it does not apply to me, in future they will secure the trial transcripts. And that makes me feel better!

Karl Watson ER0867
HMP Swaleside
Eastchurch
Isle of Sheppey
Kent
ME12 4DZ

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Justice denied and a system that is fundamentally flawed causes concern
The essence of justice is being undermined through policy changes that will destroy our supposedly impartial judicial process.

Recent changes by the Home Office, have expanded the criteria for those who may sit as a magistrates.

Retired police officers, civilian police staff, their spouses and also serving special constables can be recruited actively as magistrates. A recent advert to this effect was placed in NARPO - magazine of the National Association of Retired Police Officers, August 2003 , issue 35 p16.

This is appalling and undermines the essence of impartiality that should be shown within our courts. To be judged by someone who openly associates either through an association for retired police officers is fundamentally wrong. It allows for active bias from within the bench and being directed against any defendant. When one considers that only recently was it admitted that police service are institutionally racist,(John Grieve, Met Deputy Commissioner interview with Sky News, then followed by several provincial force Chief Constables) and when one considers that it is imperative for any defendant to be judged with the utmost integrity and impartiality then, this beggars belief.

Police officers in general are not renowned for their honesty or their integrity and all will have likely performed some mistaken belief for a fellow colleague at some stage in their careers.
This will create more anomalies within the judicial process at a time when it is hoped to alleviate sentence discrepancies, which currently cause concern for most working or indeed entering the criminal justice system. One could use the analogy that it is like being judged by the Klu-Klux Klan if you are a black defendant or even having the same trial standing as those in Guantanemo bay.
Despite its avowed commitment to the fundamental principle that any accused is to be presumed innocent and the corollary that the burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) lies squarely on the prosecution, the English criminal justice system appears altogether too likely to prosecute and to convict the innocent.
Most criminal justice practices are inherently coercive and are seen to act with prejudice and inconsistency. At its simplest the criminal justice process is the process by which those who have allegedly transgressed the criminal law are dealt with by the state.
This is obviously no longer the scenario, as it is clear by this type of meddling that one is to be tried by a police officer. The very nature that he or she has become a member of an association solely used by police officers and solely for their benefit flaws the essence of judicial impartiality.
The critical legal studies movement has heavily challenged Law as an impartial arbiter, as a dispenser of even-handed justice, as a protector of the rights of all.

It has become clear that whilst law may become less white centered, less male centered and while the rights it protects and of harms it proscribes may be expanded, there will always be a gap between law and justice.
Justice is something that must concern individuality, singularity, the precise match of remedy to situation, while law is concerned with generality. Justice is an aspiration of law, it cannot be an achievement of law.
Bias within the criminal justice system is indeed a major concern. Bias can operate at any or every stage of the criminal process, Bias occurs for a variety of reasons, it often results not from deliberate discrimination, but from unconscious prejudices and stereotypes, and even as an unintended consequence of prima facie reasonable attitudes, practices and decisions. For whatever reason such bias has led to critiques claiming the system functions to reinforce the position of powerful sections of society over the less powerful, and this is more evident since the Labour Government permitted such a policy that would result in more convictions, not by real even handed justice but by acting through criminality itself.

I would like to see even handed justice for all, as this is the only way to combat growing crime. One of the most fundamental principles of criminal law is that a person should not be punished unless he or she has both committed the act or omission in question and is blameworthy, research shows that stop and search arrests are often based not on 'reasonable suspicion' but on prejudice.
Suspects should be detained in police custody only when it is necessary, but in fact it is almost unheard of for detention not to be authorised.
The intrinsic nature of cop culture can create crime. They are expected to find and bring to court those suspected of having committed an offence, but while doing so must stay within the law and the restraints imposed by the adversarial system of justice. This policy change encourages bias and prejudice within a system that up until 2002 at least held some form of impartiality.

It raises deep concerns for all sections of an equal society, but it becomes less equal for ethnic minorities and women who both presently suffer bias and flawed judgements from the system. This policy change does little to encourage members from either ethnic groups or even women into the JP's role, yet does much to encourage people with a proven track record of 'public misfeasance', to continue to exert their power over the vulnerable and less informed and that can only reinforce what is already a fundamentally flawed justice system.

Karen Clark Stapleton

Ex Police and Prison Officer
MSc: Criminal Justice Research student
Karen622207855@aol.com

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Tory shadow Home Secretary calls for death penalty by lethal injection

David Davis, the new Shadow Home Secretary has said that Murders which involve more than one victim, should attract the "Death Penalty by lethal injection" which he favours over the "more antiquated methods such as hanging". He states that in these kinds of cases, a conviction is unlikely to be wrong. (reported in various Sunday nationals)

Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (MOJO), has responded to Mr. Davis as follows:

Dear Mr. Davis,
How absolutely disheartening to see a new Shadow Home Secretary show such disregard for justice.

Do you really understand why public confidence in the system is at an all time low?

Do you actually know how many people have been wrongly convicted of Murder in the last 2 decades and acquitted in the Court of Appeal?

Do you actually know how many more people convicted of Murder are waiting to challenge those convictions in the Court of Appeal?

Have you any real conception of the scale of general wrongful convictions in England and Wales?

Are you yet another politician who has absolutely nothing new to bring to the table. What is your response to the fact that in the last 15 years, more than 80,000 citizens have been wrongly convicted at first instance and have had to battle the appellate processes for justice, without even an apology.

You say that the death penalty would not include cases where more than one person was killed at the same time because that shows a degree of evil by the perpetrator and the reason why people are against the death penalty very often is because of the risk of getting it wrong. You say with serial murders, that is unlikely to happen.

Precisely how do you explain that to the family of a single murder victim? Why would you believe that bereaving families of a single murder conviction could cope with such policy bias. You cheapen the value of that tragic loss of life - it is shameful. Any predatory Murderer, deserves just punishment no matter how many victims there have been and if rehabilitation is possible then it should be done, and if rehabilitation is not possible then we have penal institutions in which such people can remain, isolated from society. This is the 21st Century Mr. Davis - not the 1800's!

Further more, this country has seen the exposure of some terrible miscarriages of justice - crimes in which there were indeed multi-victims - the very convictions you allege are unlikely to be wrong. Where is your evidence based argument for that statement?

How disappointing for the thousands and thousands of voters in this country -that the new Shadow Home Secretary can't get to grips with the real issues on crime and disorder. We all know what they are. How refreshing it would be, if just one political party actually listened to the citizens.

Hazel Keirle,
MOJO

Mojonational@aol.com
http://www.mojo.freehosting.net/

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http://www.mojuk.org.uk
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"This has nothing to do with justice, this is about revenge."


End this Blakelock obsession

The Metropolitan Police continues to waste valuable resources in a futile pursuit of revenge

Stafford Scott The Observer Sunday December 7, 2003
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto...1101559,00.html

The news that the Metropolitan Police is to reopen the investigation into the murder of PC Keith Blakelock comes as no surprise to me. The truth is that every time the black community of Tottenham feels that the scales of justice are finally turning in our direction, the Met does its best to remind us where power really lies.

My name is Stafford Scott; I worked as the senior youth and community worker on Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, in the immediate aftermath of 6 October 1985, a date now synonymous with the 'Tottenham riots' and the murder of PC Blakelock.

I was arrested three times during the Farm investigations, twice on the grounds that I was involved in the Blakelock murder; I was never charged and successfully sued the police for their impertinence. My younger brother was charged with riot and affray; he was also found not guilty. My elder brother was charged with offences resulting from the raid on our family home to arrest me; he, too, was found not guilty of any offence and successfully sued the Met.

Although I became a major target in the police investigation, I have also gained the somewhat 'privileged' position of being one of the few black men who can say publicly: 'I was there, I saw it from the start.' Because of what I saw that night - racist policing designed to suppress the community's right to protest at the death of a black mother - I was to become one of the 'leaders' of the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign and, as such, have followed the police investigation and resulting court cases avidly.

The prelude to this latest investigation, a case review, began almost to the day Winston Silcott was awarded damages of £50,000 in an out-of-court settlement from the Met. We were told at that time that it would take a year to complete, but it has taken more than three years, and news that there is now to be a new full-blown police inquiry comes just a few weeks after Winston's release from prison.
This has nothing to do with justice, this is about revenge. A bobby was killed in horrific circumstances and no one has paid for it. It was OK as long as Winston was locked up, even though he was acquitted of this crime almost a decade ago. Isn't it strange that for 18 years the Met and the majority of the media have gone to great lengths to convince us that all the evidence led to Winston, yet now that he is free they have miraculously identified six new suspects?

They claim to have gleaned new information by going over all the 6,000 statements that they took in the original investigation. However, that investigation has been discredited in the Court of Appeal; the forensic ESDA test revelations proved conclusively that Winston had been framed.

So damning was the evidence against the police who led the original inquiry that the prosecutor, Roy Amlot QC, uttered the following words in response to a question from defence counsel: 'The answer is, unequivo cally, we would not have gone against Braithwaite, against Raghip, or against any other defendants having learned of the apparent dishonesty of the officer in charge of the case.' In essence, the Crown was accepting what the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign had been saying all along - that this was a corrupt investigation

Revenge, however, is not justice. The statements that the Met refer to now are, in many cases, complete fantasy and were dismissed as such by Mr Justice Hodgson, the judge in the original trial. This time around, I do not believe the judiciary is going to be as compliant and gullible as it was in 1987.

Another thing that will not be the same is the community. We can never be made to be as frightened now as we were then. Like an army of occupation, hundreds of the Met's finest 'took back' the estate and stayed for almost 18 months. At the same time, armed police squads were dragging us to police stations all over London, denying us access to solicitors, and fitting up the most vulnerable among us. Some things have changed, though, now that the world knows about the 'institutional racism' within the Met. It would be nice to think that, as a result, white Britain will not turn its back on us as it did then.

The initial investigation into the disturbances on Broadwater Farm was said to be the most expensive and intensive in the history of British policing. Since then, we have had at least two more equally intensive investigations. We will probably never be told the full costs.

I do know one thing, though. If the Met employed just 1 per cent of the resources used in these investigations on stopping the guns and drugs from pervading our cities, my community would be in a healthier state. If the Met spent 1 per cent of the time and expense on investigating crimes committed against black people, especially crimes committed against us by the police, then there would be no need for riots.

The Met had its chance of honouring its dead officer by getting it right the first time. It failed miserably, and it's time it accepted that because of its thirst for vengeance the real murderers of Keith Blakelock may never be found.
· Stafford Scott is director of the Bernie Grant Trust

Martyn........If an article had started with the words : 'End this Stephen Lawrence obsession'....Would you have been as keen to reproduce it.


It has been suggested that people have come forward(from the black community) with new information on PC Blakelock's murder,following the publicity of Winston Silcott's release.

It is the police's duty to investigate those claims.....wouldn't failing to do so be a 'miscarriage of justice'.

Maybe if 'MJOUK' printed cases where guilty people were wrongly freed, as well as innocent men being wrongly convicted....I might take them more seriously.

The only suggested "new evidence" as Stafford rightly points out in his article comes from the already discredited statements the police gathered at the time. None of which would be admissible in court. I haven't seen anything anywhere that implies new witness from any section of the community coming forward.

I think the only reason a new investigation is being instigated is so that in a year or so the Met can drop it saying, "no further suspects are being looked at" once again implying the guilt of Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithewaite.

I lived in Gloucester Road Tottenham at the time and believe me it was a horrible time to live there. I have real sympathy for all the victims of what happened but particularly the Blakelock and Jarrett families.

I only wish I could believe that it was a genuine attempt by the Met to find Keith Blakelocks killers.

Yes. Because it would undoubtedly have come from people who think that its not such a terrible thing to stab a black teenager to death in the street. That its not reprehensible for the officers to ignore the entreaties of the victims friend and go after the perpetrators but to arrest him for the stabbing.

On your other point, I have been surprised to find messages from MOJUK in my inbox that do just that.
Sign up and you'll see for yourself.
But read them all. I always find myself wondering, albeit briefly I must admit, that if we live in a free country, with impartial policing, a fair judicial system and democracy, just what must it be like to live in a country that doesn't "enjoy" these privelidges?

I have over the years encountered the odd hard working, dedicated, impartial, ssympathetic/empathic copper. They are a rare breed indeed. For the most part too many of them prove themselves to be overtly racist, frighteningly stupid, lazy to the point of being practically moribund and vindictive. They consistantly bring the force and their professional colleagues into disrepute, thereby ensuring that, drought like, the respect of the public for those who are charged with upholding law and order, evaporates away.

Is it not also a 'terrible thing' for someone to be hacked to death with a machete ?. (ie- blakelock)

[quote=the klf,Dec 7 2003, 04:59 PM]





[/QUOTE]
Is it not also a 'terrible thing' for someone to be hacked to death with a machete ?. (ie- blakelock) [/quote]
Well if he wasn't a copper and part of a racist,biggoted,unfair,lazy unsupported institution, then maybe.

[QUOTE=matt w,Dec 7 2003, 05:14 PM][QUOTE=the klf,Dec 7 2003, 04:59 PM]





[/QUOTE]
Is it not also a 'terrible thing' for someone to be hacked to death with a machete ?. (ie- blakelock) [/QUOTE]
Well if he wasn't a copper and part of a racist,biggoted,unfair,lazy unsupported institution, then maybe.[/QUOTE]

IDIOT !.

The police fucked up before the riots - they fucked up during the riots and they BADLY fucked up after the riots and they seem hell bent on continuing to fuck up.

Of course it's horrible that a policeman was stabbed to death but it is equally horrible that a middle aged innocent woman died in her home as a direct result of police action.

Those that died or were imprisoned aren't the only victims of that night. The whole community suffered.

Stafford Scott is an old mate of mine - He speaks the truth.

I think the 'true-colours' of a few BB posters are beginning to emerge on this particular thread.

Their seemingly 'sane' veneer is wearing off.....and their real extremist beliefs are rising to the surface.

Does this mean you're going to admit to being a blue Tory voter?

Are you accusing a Billy Bragg fan of being a Tory supporter.

Well listen to "from red to blue" and if the cap fits...........

Well listen to 'Goalhanger' and if the cap fits............

Na, totally off target.

Well said Dickie, incidentally ...

QUOTE

hacked to death

Think this was a Sun piece of journo shite that unfortunately stuck in the public forum, as intended, and is even used by BBC news chaps without challenge. It is a deliberately worded phrase that conjures up hordes of native africans attacking the poor white missionaries etc., etc. Racist claptrap. I believe the poor devil was actually stabbed in the neck.

Perish the thought, but then you aren't much of a BB supporter are you!

Very good point Al.

The offending word has been duly edited.

Is this a miscarriage of justice?

More than you are Alberr.

Try contributing to the MUSIC thread ocassionally.!!

I sure Billy appreciates someone who is a fan of his,because they reconise his musical talents and songwriting abilities.......Rather than the majority who just jumped on his coat tails(and belaitedly got into his music),because he holds the same political views as yourselves.

Meanwhile back in the real world

What? and expose my dreadful ignorance in front of clever brainy dicks like you?

Here's one of the many ways New Labour are improving life for everybody, regardless of social background, in the UK.

Remember kids! Be Good or The Blunkett will get you.

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Miscarriages of JusticeUK (MOJUK)
mojuk@mojuk.org.uk
http://www.mojuk.org.uk
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Anger over children locked alone in jail cells
Martin Bright, home affairs editor The Observer Sunday January 11, 2004
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...1120713,00.html

Disruptive children in youth prisons are being kept in solitary confinement in bare cells where they are stripped naked and forced to use the floor as a toilet.

Over the past year more than 100 children were sent to punishment cells which have no light, ventilation, furniture or sanitation, The Observer can reveal.

Prison reformers described the practice as 'barbaric' and expressed horror that it was so widespread. The use of 'strip cells' is outlawed by human rights legislation.

The Howard League for Penal Reform is investigating an allegation that two young offenders were kept in solitary confinement for more than a year.

New figures released by the Home Office show that the cells have been used systematically over the last year, despite official assurances that they were used in just one institution.

A parliamentary answer to Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Mark Oaten reveals that 'special cells' were used 153 times at youth prisons across the country. Top of the list is Huntercombe in Oxfordshire, where they were used 46 times, followed by Feltham in west London (32) and Lancaster Farms (27).

The use of the cells came to light 14 months ago at Stoke Heath Young Offenders' Institution, where one child was held in a bare isolation cell for five days. The Stoke Heath cells, the Home Office figures show, were used 14 times in the past year.

At the time Martin Narey, then director general of the Prison Service, confirmed that clothing would be removed if it threatened the child's safety.

A court case brought last summer by the Howard League for Penal Reform sought to end the use of solitary confinement for children. The judge found it was lawful to separate or segregate children for short periods but said they should be treated humanely and given access to education and family visits. The prison reform charity has called for an immediate investigation into the cases of two teenagers allegedly kept in solitary confinement.

Last month the Home Office confirmed that the cells at Stoke Heath were still being used but only for extremely violent children. A spokeswoman said 'we are as certain as we can be' that such cells were not being used in other prisons.

The prison service is supposed to have abandoned the use of strip cells for children. The Home Office insists the cells are only used in extreme circumstances for segregation purposes, not punishment.

Prisons Minister Paul Goggins told Parliament last month: 'Special accommodation may only be used for the temporary confinement of a violent or refractory prisoner and not as a punishment. As soon as the original justification for the use of the special accommodation has ceased, the young person will be moved.'

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League, said it was prepared to conduct an immediate investigation into the use of punishment cells. 'You have to treat children with decency if you want them to change their behaviour. This barbaric practice must stop.' Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said the full scale of the use of isolation cells was still unknown and several questions remained unanswered.

'Are these so-called special cells anything like the strip cells which the prison service abandoned in anticipation of human rights challenges? What does their irregular use say about differences in treatment in juvenile prisons?'

'If this is the only way in a prison to prevent a young person seriously harming themselves or others, should our most vulnerable and volatile young people be held elsewhere?'

================
Miscarriages of JusticeUK (MOJUK)
mojuk@mojuk.org.uk
http://www.mojuk.org.uk
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Wayne Lawrence - Another suicide in police custody! - January 6th 2004

Source for this message: "Mick D" <workingclasshero@blueyonder.co.uk>

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Family's double suicide tragedy

By Jenny Watson, Echo Reporter Jan 15 2004
http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100new...ndex.cfm?page=2

A MERSEYSIDE woman today told of her anger and heartache after both of her sons committed suicide in police custody.
Rita Haigh (pictured with husband Tony) was told last week that her youngest son Wayne Lawrence had been found hanged in the back of a police van.
Her eldest son Philip Lawrence hanged himself 10 years ago in a cell at Bootle's Marsh Lane police station.
Now Mrs Haigh and her husband Tony, from Southport, have called for an overhaul of police policy so vulnerable prisoners are treated sensitively.
Mrs Haigh said both her sons had previously been on suicide watch while serving prison sentences and needed to be treated with extreme care.
She said it was the job of police to ensure the welfare of people in their custody, and urged better communication between the prison service, probation and police.
Today, the Police Complaints Authority admitted that the sharing of information about vulnerable people was a serious problem which was under investigation.
Mrs Haigh said: "My boys were no angels but they did not deserve to die.
"Both of them were vulnerable young men and needed special attention. They were at risk and nobody seemed to care."
Mrs Haigh said her world collapsed last Tuesday when police told her how Wayne, 33, had been taken to Wigan Royal Infirmary after hanging himself from a light fitting in a police van.
He had been arrested in Wigan on suspicion of burglary at a Dixons store in Market Place in the town centre. He had been left in the van by himself as police went after another suspect.
He had served jail terms in Walton and in Rochdale for theft offences. In phone calls to his mother he revealed that he had been put on suicide watch.
At the time of his arrest last week, Mrs Haigh says, he was being prescribed medication for depression and schizophrenia.
Greater Manchester police have launched an investigation into the death under the supervision of the Police Complaints Authority. An inquest was opened on Monday and adjourned pending the outcome of that investigation.
But for Mrs Haigh, the whole story is heart-breakingly familiar.
Ten years ago, Philip, 28, was arrested after his exgirlfriend reported he was harassing her. He was found hanging just a few hours after being admitted into custody. He had used a noose made from his trousers.
Mrs Haigh said: "No mother expects to lose two sons, especially not in the same way.
"Ten years have not healed the pain of losing Phil, and now it's like history repeating itself.
"It is only my grandchildren that are keeping me going."

Philip had made four separate suicide attempts and been put on suicide watch by prison staff while serving an earlier sentence, Mrs Haigh said.
She believes that his death and that of Wayne could have been avoided if officers were automatically alerted to anybody who could be considered "at risk".
She said: "I don't want other families to go through what we have and if there are ways the system could be improved, now should be the time."
Greater Manchester police said Wayne's death was being investigated by the Police Complaints Authority.
A spokesman for the PCA said: "A study carried out for the Home Of f ice revealed people with a history of self harm are 100 times more likely to try, or even succeed, suicide in the future.
"The issue of exchange of information between prisons and police is a problem we are aware of.
"The question of prison ser vice marker s on patients with a history of self harm, and whether they are being passed on to police, is an important issue and will form part of the investigation."

The Association of Chief Police Officers said prisoners are asked whether they have a history of self harm when they are booked into custody. The police national computer holds records of all incidents of self harm which occur while criminals are in police care.

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I got an email from MOJUK earlier with news of two other suicides in custody.
It's getting worse all the time and when parents say that the police don't seem to care they get the response which appears in the last paragraph of the above post.

As we all know, people who are undergoing treatment for mental health problems are always the first to let all and sundry know of their condition.
And it goes without saying that if you've had frequent run ins with plod throughout your teens and early adulthood, been treated as always with the utmost care, consideration and respect, you're obviously going to be bright eyed and bushy tailed answering all of their questions as soon as you're in front of the custody sergeant.

================
Miscarriages of JusticeUK (MOJUK)
mojuk@mojuk.org.uk
http://www.mojuk.org.uk
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" An ordeal like mine either makes you or breaks you. They tried to crush me, but I wasn't having it. Yet sometimes I chuckle to myself. There's just me and this huge system, and over the years, I've got it in disarray." Winston Silcott

'They created Winston Silcott, the beast of Broadwater Farm. And they won't let this creation lie down and die'

It was a defining moment of the Eighties - the brutal murder of PC Keith Blakelock during the Tottenham riots. For Winston Silcott, jailed for the killing but cleared on appeal, the story goes on. In a revealing interview, he tells David Rose about life in prison, his fight to clear his name - and what happened on the night of 6 October 1985

The Observer Sunday January 18, 2004
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/stor...1125429,00.html

'I'm not free,' says Winston Silcott. 'I might be standing here posing for your photographer. But in the minds of so many, the association just goes on - Winston Silcott and Keith Blakelock.' He twists the brim of his baseball cap against the winter sun, then unexpectedly smiles. 'An ordeal like mine either makes you or breaks you. They tried to crush me, but I wasn't having it. Yet sometimes I chuckle to myself. There's just me and this huge system, and over the years, I've got it in disarray.'

It is 17 years since Silcott, now 44, sat with five other men in the dock at the Old Bailey accused of murdering PC Blakelock, hacked with machetes and stabbed with knives in the riot on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London, on 6 October 1985.

Once he had entered his plea of 'not guilty', Silcott did not speak, but he dominated the two-month trial that followed. Reporters who covered the case thought we saw a tall, bearded, well-built Afro-Caribbean man who always dressed immaculately. The police and prosecution urged us to believe we were looking at a monster, the ringleader of a savage mob, which had planned to sever Blakelock's head and mount it on a pole, like a medieval trophy.

Atavistic racial imagery lay close to the surface. According to statements taken by detectives, Silcott had brandished a machete, dripping with blood, and proclaimed to cheers: 'This is bullman's blood.' He had, they claimed, thrust a sword into the hands of a 13-year-old white boy, Jason Hill, and forced him, on pain of death, to slash Blakelock's prostrate form to 'make my mark' and then told him: 'You cool, man.'

In the third week of March 1987, after two months of evidence and three days' deliberation, the jury returned to court. Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite, known from that day on as the Tottenham Three, were pronounced guilty. Silcott, said the judge, must serve at least 30 years: he was 'a very vicious and evil man'.

This, in the eyes of large parts of the media and police service, is what he remains. The Court of Appeal may have quashed Silcott's conviction less than five years later, in November 1991. But reports and off-the-record briefings by police officers continue to insinuate that does not mean he was innocent.

Less than a month after Silcott's release from prison last October, where he served 18 years for a different murder - of the boxer and gangster Tony Smith, for which he had been on bail at the time of the Tottenham riot - the police announced a new investigation into the Blakelock killing. Police sources hinted that Silcott, thanks to advances in forensic technology and the abolition of the 'double jeopardy' rule, might find himself charged again.

'The solicitor for Winston Silcott, first convicted and then acquitted of the [Blakelock] murder, says his client has nothing to fear,' Richard Littlejohn wrote in the Sun. 'Then we can be sure Mr Silcott will co-operate fully with the new investigation.' The Tottenham Three's successful appeal, it was implied, had been down to dubious technicalities. The Telegraph said it rested on 'doubts about the integrity of police notes of potentially incriminatory comments he had allegedly made in an interview'. The Court of Appeal had not found him innocent, reports said, merely quashed his conviction as 'unsafe'.

Until today, Silcott has maintained his public silence. Now, as he fights to clear his name of the Smith murder, too, citing evidence that he acted in self-defence, he speaks publicly for the first time about the night of the riot and all that has happened thereafter. 'They created something out of nothing: Winston Silcott, the monster, the beast of Broadwater Farm. And still they won't let this creation lie down and die. The system conspires to uphold itself. They should have done things properly in the first place, but they still don't want to take any blame. They'd rather put my name back in the firing line.'

One of the many differences between black and white Britons is their response to Winston Silcott. White people, or at least those who accept Silcott's ongoing characterisation by the tabloids, tend to place him in the demons' gallery reserved for criminals such as Myra Hindley or Frederick West. But on the streets of north London, where we sat having lunch in a pavement restaurant last summer while Silcott was on leave from an open prison, his treatment from African-Caribbeans is that of a returning hero.

In the course of a two-hour meal, I lost count of the times that people stopped to greet him and shake his hand - not just members of his own generation, but youths, who may not have been born at the time of the Tottenham riot.

Since his release, Silcott has been deluged by invitations to social events and political meetings, by black communities the length and breadth of Britain. 'The reason is simply that he survived,' says Stafford Scott, Silcott's closest friend from early childhood. 'The system, the police, the courts and the media tried to bury him, but just by maintaining his dignity and sanity, he defeated it. And now, in a way he's at peace: he's not bitter, he's not out for revenge. Many of us could have ended up in that situation. Many of us have also been victims of racism, and so his ordeal speaks to our experience. At the same time, we don't think we could have handled it half as well as he has, and that's why he gets so much admiration and respect.'

Silcott, whose parents were devout Seventh Day Adventists from Montserrat, grew up in Haringey, north London, experiencing the everyday racism of the education and criminal justice systems. At 13, he had saved his pocket money to buy his mother perfume for her birthday. Seeing the bottle on his desk, a teacher accused him of stealing it and telephoned the nearby pharmacy. Luckily, someone there remembered the slim black boy who had bought scent earlier that day.

A year later, Silcott was arrested for failing to display a bicycle lamp; a few months after that, he left school without qualifications for an apprenticeship making cabinets, a job that ended after 15 months when the foreman wrongly accused him of stealing canteen food.

In 1982, Lord Scarman's report on the Brixton riots was the first official recognition of what has come to be called institutionalised racism, especially in the police: 'I do not doubt harassment does occur... many believe that the police routinely abuse their powers.' The cost, said Scarman, was alienation and thwarted lives: 'The damage done by even the occasional display of racial prejudice is incalculable.' He could have been describing Silcott's teens and early twenties, when he and his friends were repeatedly harassed, often under the old 'sus' law, which criminalised a generation by allowing the police to arrest anyone they thought was acting suspiciously, even if they had committed no crime.

Court two at the Old Bailey, and a trial for the murder of a well-regarded community policeman, felt like the logical culmination of this process. As the hearing went on, I became increasingly convinced that Silcott and his co-defendants were innocent and the case against them was dangerously flawed.

American historian David Blight shows in his book, Race and Reunion, how the distorted way that the US Civil War came to be remembered, especially in the South, affected subsequent events. Within a few decades, slavery and racism were airbrushed out of the story, allowing the war to be seen as a tragic fraternal quarrel, now healed. Possibly America could not deal with the scale of its wounds in any other way, but in such circumstances, slavery's descendants - lynching and segregation - flourished without hindrance.

Public memory is being falsified too over the murder at Broadwater Farm, although Silcott and the wounds caused by confrontational policing of black communities, are very much alive.

We meet at the office of the Freedom Ark, a social-work project attached to a church less than a mile from Broadwater Farm. Next month, a BBC documentary will re-examine Silcott's story. The producers, he says, have told him they want to explode his demonic persona and show him as a human being. He says he hopes it will do some good. Yet, for a second, he gives me a look of desperation. 'This isn't about my personality. I just want people to know the facts.'

The evidence adduced by the Blakelock prosecutor, Roy Amlot QC, was as weak as the allegations were lurid. There were no eyewitnesses to the killing and no forensic evidence. Neither Silcott nor his co-defendants appeared in any of the 1,000 police photographs of the riot. The case rested on the veracity of confessions taken by detectives who made 368 separate arrests and terrified a community whose help they should have tried to enlist. All the nightmarish, ritualistic accounts of the killing came from juveniles, some with severe learning difficulties, who were held for days without access to their parents or solicitors.

By the time the trial reached its halfway mark, the judge, Mr Justice Hodgson, said the case was giving him 'sleepless nights'. For example, Jason Hill, the boy who claimed Silcott forced him to 'make his mark', had confessed only after three days spent naked except for a blanket. Hill's story 'screamed fantasy,' said the the judge. He directed that Hill and two fellow juveniles, Mark Pennant and Mark Lambie, be freed.

The only evidence left against Silcott was the record of his fifth police interview, with its allegedly incriminating admissions. This was before police interviews were taped, so the only guarantee of the accuracy of Silcott's handwritten interrogation record was the integrity, or otherwise, of the officers involved - the leader of the investigation, Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Melvin of Scotland Yard's Serious Crimes Squad, and his deputy, Detective Chief Inspector Maxwell Dingle. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Newman, was phoning Melvin daily for reports on his progress.

Academic studies of police 'verbals' - bogus statements attributed to suspects - have found that detectives, rather than manufacturing an outright admission ('It's a fair cop, guv'), will often fabricate denials which are themselves incriminating. Having stayed silent for three days, Melvin and Dingle claimed Silcott's dam suddenly burst when they asked whether he had attacked Blakelock with a machete and forced others to cut him. 'Who told you that?' their record had Silcott saying, 'They're only kids. No one's going to believe them... you ain't got enough evidence. Those kids will never go to court. You wait and see. No one else will talk to you. You can't keep me away from them... they won't give evidence against me.'

The officers' record even included stage directions: 'Silcott,' they claimed, 'looked out of the window, stood up, went back to his chair and then said, "You cunts".' He then supposedly leaned back in his chair and said: 'Jesus, Jesus.' This prompted Amlot to make a novel addition to the language of English criminal law. Here, he told the jury, Silcott had adopted a 'guilty posture'.

Four years after the trial, a new technique - electrostatic document analysis, or Esda - was transforming the criminal justice system by exposing fabricated police interrogation records. It works on the principle that when someone writes on a sheet of paper in a numbered pad, such as a police interview book, the tiny dents made by a pen on the first sheet will show up on the sheet below. Esda makes these impressions visible,and in an accurate record, where no extra sheets have been inserted, the dents on page one will show up on page two, those on page two on page three and so on.

Those of us who believed in Silcott's innocence - his family, his solicitor, Andrew Hall (now a QC) and myself - had agonising discussions. What if Esda showed the record was accurate? In the end, there seemed to be no choice: he had already lost his first appeal and Esda appeared his only chance. In fact, he hit the jackpot.

As Robert Radley, the scientist who conducted the tests, later told the Court of Appeal, the pages containing the damaging admissions and stage directions had been inserted some time after the rest of the notes - all supposedly made contemporaneously - were written. A second scientist repeated the tests: he not only confirmed them, but found that the paper on which the admissions were written had come from a different batch.

To his credit, Amlot recognised that this was no technicality. 'We fully accept the position,' he told the court; the tests meant, said lawyer Michael Mansfield in court, that Melvin and Dingle had lied. The Crown, Amlot said, could no longer contest the appeal, and he accepted that even without Esda tests of their own, the disputed confessions by Silcott's co-defendants could no longer be believed. If Melvin had fabricated his, the most important interview, the entire investigation and the convictions it produced had to be seen as 'contaminated'. The Court of Appeal made it clear that Melvin and Dingle were not called to give evidence.

Until this case, the Court of Appeal had never apologised to any victim of a miscarriage of justice. This time, Lord Justice Farquharson said: 'In allowing these appeals, we wish to express our profound regret that they have suffered as a result of the shortcomings of the criminal process. No system of trials is proof against perjury, but this will be little comfort to its victims.'

Silcott says: 'You don't read this in the papers now. The facts don't get printed. Reporters who had nothing to do with the case ask whether there's any possibility I might be tried for the Blakelock murder all over again. But one thing I do know: if the new investigation is going to use those old statements from 1985 in any way at all, it's going to be crap, because all they're going to do is recycle the same old lies.'

For 17 years, Silcott could only watch from the sidelines. His previous conviction for the Smith murder compelled his lawyers to advise him he could not go into the witness box. 'I wanted to give evidence, tell the court I never said those things, but my solicitor said, "You've already been convicted of murder. And if you now call those officers liars, tell the jury that they fabricated your interview, then the judge is going to let the prosecution reveal you are already serving life for murder. You won't have a chance." It was so frustrating, to sit there day after day and listen to Melvin and Dingle and say nothing.

'The first time I ever saw Engin Raghip, Jason Hill, Mark Pennant and all those guys was when we appeared on remand at Highbury magistrates' court. I wasn't in the same age group as Jason Hill or Mark Pennant: they were 13 and I was 26. I would never have recognised them. Any one who knew me could have told the police I never went around with people younger than me. But because the police had to make their story, they made me the target when they were interrogating the kids, and put them under every kind of pressure to make them say that I was the person who led the killing.'

In the weeks after Blakelock's murder, the Metropolitan Police came close to mutiny, with Commissioner Newman shouted down at meetings with his officers, some of whom called on him to resign. As with many miscarriages of justice, this was a case where the police had to get results.

'Over the years I've often asked, "Why me?"' says Silcott. 'Sure I'd had my share of beefs with the cops, but so did a lot of black guys in the Eighties. The answer is that they knew they could get away with it. It was very easy for them to make me a target, much easier than it would have been with anyone else, because I was out on bail for murder. They knew they could fabricate anything they liked because the other murder case would come into the arena. That was the reason they could be so bold and so brazen.'

Another crucial stage in the formation in the false public memory of the Blakelock murder case came in 1994, when Melvin and Dingle stood trial, accused of perjury and perverting the course of justice. For reasons which have never been explained, the prosecution did not call Silcott as a witness, so denying him the chance to tell the jury that he had not uttered the words in his interview record. More surprisingly, the jury was allowed to hear a series of lurid, gory police statements repeating the claim that Silcott had been the murder ringleader. Their authors, the court was told, would have appeared in person, but had not done so 'through fear'.

The truth was different. All the most damaging allegations came from a familiar source - the statements taken by Melvin's team in 1985. Jason Hill's ritualistic story, dismissed as fantasy by the Blakelock trial judge, was again touted as fact. And was fear the real reason that he chose not to repeat it in Melvin's defence? Hill told me: 'The first I knew they were going to use my statement was when it suddenly flashed up on the telly. It is disgraceful... I never was a witness to the killing and I'm not one now.' Melvin and Dingle were acquitted and Melvin has always insisted that the fifth interview was an accurately recorded contemporaneous note.

So where was Silcott when Blakelock was killed? The answer is on Broadwater Farm - not rioting, but lying low in a flat, desperate to avoid further trouble. As the riot started at about 7pm, Silcott says he was being dropped at Tottenham police station by a former girlfriend to sign for his bail. The station's signing-in book should corroborate this, but it has disappeared.

'I left the police station at about 7.15,' he says. 'I got back into the car and my girlfriend drove me to the Farm, where I lived and had my greengrocer's shop. I could see a lot of people running about, wearing masks and everything. I already suspected something was up because when I left the police station there were untold police cars and vans parked in front of the nick. I said we had to get over to Tangmere [the block near which Blakelock was killed] to protect my shop.

'And look, I'm on bail for a murder. I know I'm stupid, but I'm not that stupid. There's helicopters, police photographers everywhere. All I could think about was that I didn't want to lose my bail. I saw a young guy with a scaffolding pole and he made as if he was going to throw it through the window of my shop. I stopped him. Then I saw Pam, a friend of mine. She said, "You'd better come up. You know the police don't like you."'

Silcott spent the rest of the night in the flat, where Pam lived with her sister. Others came and went, but much of the time he dozed. Next morning, he returned to his shop on the Tangmere 'deck'. Blakelock had been murdered nearby. A photograph taken early that day shows Silcott dressed in a mackintosh, talking quietly to two PCs. 'They were giving out leaflets appealing for information about the officer's death. I was asking them if they would mind moving a little from the doorway, because they were blocking it and might intimidate customers.'

As the Smith case prevented Silcott from challenging the material that convicted him, his continued association with the Blakelock killing kept him in prison for six years past his recommended tariff of 12 years. Every time he inched towards release, saturation media coverage set him back. 'And if I had been guilty of murdering Smith, I'd have jumped through all the hoops to get out at the earliest opportunity,' he says. 'But I wouldn't do anger management and all these foolish courses. If I had an anger problem, the whole country had an anger problem. No one in their right mind is just going to stand there and let someone attack and stab them.'

Eleven years ago, his lawyers submitted a petition to the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, arguing that his claim of self-defence should be referred to the Court of Appeal. This included details of threats which Smith had made in the weeks before his death to kill Silcott for defending a friend who had fallen foul of his gang, the Yankee Posse; statements from witnesses at the party where Smith died, who said he drew a knife and attacked Silcott without provocation; and crucial testimony from a police officer, Detective Sergeant Douglas Hill, which surprisingly had not been disclosed by the Crown when Silcott first stood trial.

Hill said the doorman at the party told him: 'Between you and me, the dead guy caused it all. He came in with a knife and cut Sticks [Silcott] and Sticks defended himself. Smith brought it all on himself.' I traced the doorman, who repeated this story. Finally, there was evidence from Silcott's own body: a thin brown line on the bridge of his nose, the faded scar left by a knife wound, inflicted, he says, by Smith.

Howard refused that petition and Silcott knows clearing his name will be no easier now. He went into prison a young man and has emerged in middle age. He hopes to have his conviction for murder quashed before his parents die.

'My family has got a lot older in the time I've been in prison. They're not the same people I left. This thing has destroyed a load of people's lives.'
He looks hard for something good to come from his derailed life. 'I want to use my experience to deter young people from getting involved with crime and drugs. There have been big changes since I was last on the street. Today, they've all got guns. If it [the riot] happened again now, it would be mayhem.'


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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HMP Newhall - Women burn, strangle and stab themselves in jail hell

Martin Bright reports from two prisons where self-harm is now a bizarre death cult. Warders who are struggling to halt the epidemic are forced to act as therapists
The Observer Sunday February 8, 2004
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...1143469,00.html

On his first night as a prison officer at New Hall jail, Andy Marsden had to cut down six women after they tried to hang themselves in their cells. 'I thought I had died and gone to hell,' says Marsden, now a senior officer in the prison hospital. Marsden grew accustomed to seeing women on the brink of death. 'There was one woman there and I only saw her when she was blue.'

Since then he has seen hundreds of women try to take their lives in New Hall, a 400-bed prison outside Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Like every officer at New Hall, Marsden carries a specially designed blade encased in plastic to cut the women free. Several officers told The Observer of nights when they had been forced to sprint from cell to cell to slice off home-made nooses the women use to stop the blood supply to their brains.

Where male prisons are often dominated by a brooding atmosphere of violence, women's prisons are suffused with mutilation and despair.

Marsden's colleague Tony Ellis, head of operations at New Hall, remembers sitting with a physically healthy prisoner who was desperate to be transferred to the prison hospital. 'I told her it was full and I couldn't simply transfer her when the need of others was greater.' The woman looked Ellis in the eye, raised her arm and bit into it like a chunk of meat. 'You could hear the flesh tear. It was horrible,' he says. 'She got her way all right. I sent her straight to the hospital.'

The stories are endless. One seriously disturbed prisoner at New Hall would cut open her own stomach and hide pens and batteries in the wound. Another sliced off strips of skin and ate them.

Drugs are central to this never-ending cycle of misery and self-hatred. Many of the women come into the prison 'crotched', with drugs stashed internally where staff are not allowed to search them (in male prisons the term used is 'plugged'). Visitors have also been caught smuggling drugs into New Hall in babies' toys and even babies' bottles.

Kelly, a 25-year-old heroin addict who was clean after nine days of rehab and ready to go back on the wing, said prison was something 'you just get used to'. On her sixteenth sentence and with over 40 previous convictions, prison was now a way of life, a cheap and easy way of going into rehab. 'I've been coming here on and off since 1997. It's just like a holiday for me.'

Of the 295 new prisoners sent to New Hall in January, 212 were put straight into detox and 188 were heroin addicts. Andy Crofts, an officer who works with the detoxing prisoners, says women's prisons have been forced to combine the work of secure mental hospitals and drug treatment centres. He also has a simple solution: 'Kill the dealers or legalise drugs. There's no other way.'

Over the past year at New Hall there have been more than 1,500 self-harm incidents, a 200 per cent rise. Last month a woman of 37 there stuffed paper into her clothes and underwear and set herself on fire in full view of other inmates. Staff saw smoke coming from her cell, but by the time they arrived she had turned herself into a human torch. The woman was rushed to hospital to undergo emergency surgery for burns and remains in a serious condition.

Few women take the extreme course of self-immolation. Most choose the traditional methods: strangulation by trainer laces, curtains or bedding. The official term for the makeshift nooses the women use is 'ligatures' and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are always new methods: some women sit in their cells all day weaving ligatures from strips of fabric and threads. 'It's almost like a comfort blanket,' said one senior officer. The women have discovered that, if you find the right pressure point on the neck, you can lose consciousness within seconds. Staff have found women hanging from cell bars, door handles, bedsteads and even from a plug in the wall.

In the latest development of this strange death cult, inmates have found that, if they twist a wet J-Cloth around their necks at night, it dries out and strangles them in their sleep. One woman told officers at New Hall that the only time she felt at peace was when she felt 'the glow of losing consciousness'.

Staff said it was often the same prisoner over and over again and, however many times a life was saved, there was no guarantee that the woman would not try again days, or even hours, later. Petra Blanksby, who strangled herself with a J-Cloth at New Hall last November and later died in hospital, had 'ligatured' on 91 previous occasions in the months before.

Three women took their lives in New Hall in 2003, but prison staff feel they are often unfairly held personally responsible for deaths in custody. 'The media understandably concentrates on the tragedies when they happen, but no one talks about the hundreds of times when lives are saved,' says Tony Ellis.

An investigation by The Observer into the crisis in Britain's female prisons has discovered a system in crisis. In all, 14 women killed themselves in prison last year, up from nine in 2002 and six in 2001. Already two women have killed themselves in prison in 2004. In one jail alone, Styal in Cheshire, four women took their lives last year, which led Prisons Minister Paul Goggins to commission an independent inquiry. But the problems are replicated across the system: the rise in self-harm and suicide had coincided with a rocketing prison population.

The latest official figures show that there are now more than 4,400 female prisoners in jail, more than double the figure a decade ago. But the rise in the suicide rate is not simply a consequence of soaring prison numbers. In the five years between 1996 and 2001, the female prison population increased by 67 per cent, but suicides in women's jails went up by 200 per cent .

Prisons taking seriously the issue of self-harm have initiated schemes to help prisoners at risk of taking their own lives. Fellow prisoners are trained by the Samaritans to become 'listeners' to look for early-warning signs from vulnerable prisoners. Other inmates are trained to talk to new prisoners as they arrive in the reception area.

Prisoners and staff agreed that, despite the deaths, the detox regime at New Hall has done more than anything else to improve tensions at the prison. But it does little to help them settle back into life outside. Gail Coupland, the nurse who heads the unit, said: 'There is no doubt that these people's lives have become more chaotic and there is often a dual diagnosis of mental illness and drug abuse. We can get them clean, but the real problem is that they have no support when they get out.'

In April the Home Office comes to the end of a three-year suicide and self-harm 'reduction strategy' and this is likely to lead to a wholesale rethink, which is expected to focus on prisoners helping each other. It will also have to deal with the high levels of drug abuse, self-harm and domestic violence in the communities that women prisoners come from.

Ministers will look for inspiration to an inquiry into women in the criminal justice system being carried out by the Fawcett Society, which is due to report at the end of March. A Home Office spokeswoman said: 'We realise it may look as if our strategy has failed, but in the context of a rising prison population we believe the numbers are steadying off.' But she added: 'This may be due to the fact that we are cutting people down more successfully.'

If it is possible, the problems for Brockhill prison in the West Midlands are even worse. This small jail, outside Redditch in Worcestershire, houses mainly remand prisoners, who stay sometimes only a matter of months before moving on to another institution or being released.

The conditions here are some of the worst in the prison system. Buildings designed in the 1960s to house an open prison are rotting. While we were there, the heating in one block failed. To end the demeaning practice of 'slopping out', Home Office regulations now state that all prisoners must have access to a lavatory. But only two cells in Brockhill have them fitted. Instead, a computerised queuing system allows women access to a shared lavatory on each landing. Many women with mental health problems fail to understand the system.

Although a new medical block is being built, there is no specialist detox unit and drug use in the prison is endemic, with 75 per cent of inmates addicted to heroin and crack.

Despite the high turnover of inmates, governor Barbara Treen has introduced a system of Samaritan listeners and even a programme of therapy for women who mutilate themselves. 'We now know there is an obvious link between domestic violence, child abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse,' she said.

Staff at Brockhill and New Hall were convinced that most women in their prisons were the victims of far more serious crimes than they had perpetrated. If Ministers are to tackle the issue seriously, they will have to address the radical question of whether the majority of women in prison should be there at all.

Brockhill's scheme, which also involves physical exercise, music and education, was developed by Julia Rose, a psychologist at Wolverhampton University. Rose says the findings have devastating ramifications for the future of penal policy. 'We estimate that 95 per cent of women in this prison have suffered some form of abuse, from domestic violence to child abuse. Three-quarters of them have some form of mental illness. These women self-harm because of abuse they have suffered.'

As a result of work done at the prison, staff have produced 50 reports of serious offences and, when women have been persuaded to give evidence, these have led to successful convictions.

Becky, a prisoner who works on the listener scheme, has reached an even bleaker conclusion. 'With the experiences they have been through, they feel they have to do it: that's their way of releasing the pressure. They get a buzz from it, and afterwards they feel better.'

Many older prison officers feel they joined the service to lock up criminals and ended up as a mixture of social workers, psychotherapists and drug counsellors.

Joe Bagguley, who runs the segregation unit at Brockhill, said: 'We are no longer prison officers, we are mental health workers. We are enthusiastic, but we are only amateurs.'

Sometimes it can get too much even for the most experienced staff. Gwynne Jones, who is responsible for suicide prevention at Brockhill, asked if he could have a quiet word during our visit. He said that he wanted to tell us about a woman had been brought in the day before on a petty theft charge.

She had come straight from hospital, where she had just had an abortion after being raped. Like so many women in Brockhill she had begun cutting herself, he said, but this one was different. Instead of the usual cuts on the arms or legs, this woman hated herself so much and felt so angry about what had happened that she had slashed open the skin around her vagina. With tears in his eyes, Jones said: 'What is that woman doing in prison? How does my training as a prison officer prepare me for that?'

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We locked you up in jail for 25 years and you were innocent all along? That'll be £80,000 please

Blunkett charges miscarriage of justice victims 'food and lodgings'

By Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor Sunday Herald Scotland 14th March 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/40592

What do you give someone who's been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn't commit?

An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you're David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty's Pleasure in British prisons.

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn't have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.

Blunkett's fight has been described as "outrageous", "morally repugnant" and the "sickest of sick jokes", but his spokesmen in the Home Office say it's a completely "reasonable course of action" as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren't in prison. The government deems the claw-back 'Saved Living Expenses'.

Paddy Hill was one of the Birmingham Six. He spent 16 years behind bars for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings by the IRA. Hill now lives on a farm with his wife and children near Beith in Scotland. He has been charged £50,000 for living expenses by the Home Office.

It wasn't until two years ago that Hill was finally awarded £960,000 in compensation. However, during the years since his release, while waiting for the pay-out, the government had given him advances of around £300,000. When his compensation came through, the £300,000 was taken back along with interest on the interim payments charged at 23% - that cost him a further £70,000.

"The whole system is absurd," Hill said. "I'm so angry about what has happened to me. I try and tell people about being charged for bed and board in jail and they can't believe it.

"When I left prison I was given no training for freedom - no counselling or psychological preparation. Yet the guilty get that when they are released. To charge me for the food I ate and the cell I slept in is almost as big an injustice as fitting me up in the first place.

"While I was in prison, my family lost their home, yet they get no compensation. But the state wants its money back. It's like being kicked in the head when someone has beat you already.

"I have to put up with this, yet there has not been one police officer convicted of fitting people up. The Home Office had no shortage of money to keep me in jail or to run a charade of a trial.

"But they had enough money to frame me. Nevertheless, when it comes to paying out compensation for ruining my life they happily rip me to shreds."

Hill is not leading the legal action against the government - instead he has handed the baton to another high-profile victim of miscarriage of justice: Mike O'Brien.

O'Brien spent 10 years in jail wrongly convicted of killing a Cardiff newsagent. His baby daughter died while he was in prison and he was charged £37,500 by the Home Office for his time behind bars.

Hill said he cannot lead the legal fight as the Birmingham Six have fought every legal action together, but now three of them are over 70 and Hill believes it is too much to ask them to join him in taking on the government yet again.

He said he was also worried about the compensation payments for the other members of the Birmingham Six being affected if they joined him in court against the government.

"The establishment hate me and people like me as we proved them wrong," he said. "They either want to ignore us or hurt us."

O'Brien took the Home Office to court last March and won, but Blunkett appealed the decision. On Tuesday, the rights and wrongs of the government policy will be decided at the Royal Courts.

O'Brien said: "Morally, the position of the government is just outrageous. It shows total contempt for the victims of miscarriages of justice. It makes me livid.

"I really believe if we win the appeal this week, the government is evil enough to take me to the House of Lords. They are trying to break us. I really think this is personal as far as the government is concerned.

"A government really can't get much worse than this. But I am confident that we will win as the law and morality are on our side."

Vincent Hickey, one of the Bridgewater Four who was wrongly convicted for killing a paperboy, was charged £60,000 for the 17 years he spent in jail. He said: "If I had known this I would have stayed on hunger-strike longer, that way I would have had a smaller bill."

John McManus, of the Scottish Miscarriage of Justice Organisation, said: "This is reprehensible. How can we call ourselves a democratic, civilised society when our government is acting like this?

"The government seems intent on punishing innocent people. The state wants to be paid for making a mistake. It's hard to believe someone actually thought this policy up. If you tell a child about this they will think it insane.

"Only a sick mind could have invented this policy, yet the government is fighting to retain the right to act like this. It is cruelty with intent. They seem to want to punish people for having the audacity to be innocent."

The SNP's shadow justice minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said: "This is outrageous. It is another assault by Blunkett on the rule of law and on civil liberties. These people didn't chose to go to prison. They were wrongly convicted, and to charge them for it beggars belief."

The Home Office said an "independent assessor appointed by the Home Secretary takes into acccount the range of costs the prisoner might have incurred had they not been imprisoned". The spokes man said the assessor was "right" to do this, adding: "Morally, this is reasonable and appropriate."
'I was a hostage, now they are billing me'
Robert Brown was just a 19-year-old from Glasgow when he was jailed for life for murdering a woman called Annie Walsh in Manchester in 1977. He served 25 years before he was finally freed in 2002, when the courts ruled him innocent of the crime.

He is now facing a bill of around £80,000 for the living expenses he cost the state. For Brown, it is the final straw. An interim payment he was given pending his full compensation offer is exhausted; his mother recently died; his relationship with his girlfriend has fallen apart and he is facing eviction from his home following a mix-up over benefits.

"I feel like ending my life," he says. "I've tried to maintain my dignity, but the state has treated me with nothing but contempt - now they are asking me for money for my bed and board in jail.

"I never contemplated suicide once while I was in prison, but it's different on the outside. I have received no counselling or support. Society is treating me like something you'd wipe off the bottom of your shoes, but I'm an innocent man and a victim of a terrible injustice.

"It's horrific. I've been out of jail for 14 months and in that time the state has put me through a war of attrition that it never needed to conduct. I feel my life is disintegrating around me.

"Making me pay for my bed and board is abhorrent. I was arrested, fitted up and held hostage for 25 years and now they are going to charge me for being kept as their prisoner against my will.

"Can you think of a more disgusting way to abuse someone? I really feel that my heart is truly and finally broken."

You'll get no argument from me on the rights (there aren't any) and wrongs of carrying out armed robberies. It's not a thing to be emcouraged in any way.

But a couple of points do spring to mind.
One is the decision to hand down a nine year sentence to the getaway car driver.
22 years old and nine years for agreeing for whatever mad reason to drive a car for your boyfriend who wants to rob a securicor van. Seems a tad harsh.
Had she been the one waving the gun about then 9 years would have been a tad lenient.
Which brings me to my second point.
The fact that armed robberies are relatively rare may well have something to do with the long sentences handed down to the gun weilder.
Perhaps sentences of a similar length could be given to 32 year old men who chat up 12 year old girls on the other side of the world, travel to meet them and then rape them.

They might think twice before risking the venture form the get go.

I will never cease to be amazed by what contorted logic seems to inhabit the minds of British judges.

But one thing is certain.
They demonstrate a breathtaking level of misogyny on a daily basis.

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Justice for Christopher Alder

'Death on Camera' a documentary on the death of Christopher Alder is to be shown in the 'Rough Justice' series at 9pm on BBC1 on Wednesday.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TV to show death under eyes of police

Sister seeks public inquiry over video footage of man choking on his own blood
Amelia Hill The Observer Sunday April 11, 2004
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...1189715,00.html

Footage showing a black former paratrooper choking to death on the floor of a police station as officers stand by laughing and joking is to be screened on prime-time television this week.

Christopher Alder's death in police custody has been investigated by the team that made The Secret Policeman, a BBC1 documentary that led to the resignations of 10 Cheshire policemen after exposing racist behaviour.

Alder suffocated to death in April 1998 in a Humberside police station as he lay face down and unconscious with his trousers and boxer shorts pulled down around his knees. His last 11 minutes, caught on CCTV and re-enacted in detail for the programme, show the father-of-two struggling for breath through his blood and vomit as he lies handcuffed at the feet of five police officers, who accuse him of play-acting.

'Throughout the footage, you can hear Christopher's breaths getting slower and slower until they stop altogether,' said his sister Janet, who has been campaigning to find the truth behind her brother's death.

'The sound is loud and rasping, and yet no one goes to help him. It's one of the most horrible things I've ever seen. I saw my brother die a painful, lonely and horrific death. I've only seen the video twice, but it haunts me.'

The five policemen have never given their side of the story or been successfully prosecuted, despite a unanimous verdict by an inquest jury in 2000 that Alder was unlawfully killed in police custody, a verdict the police failed to overturn in the High Court the following year.

After initially refusing to take the officers to court, the Crown Prosecution Service agreed to charge the men with manslaughter in 2001, but presented conflicting medical evidence and the trial judge ruled that the case be dropped against all the officers concerned.

One of the inquest jurors who watched the CCTV footage is still haunted by the memory. 'I was absolutely shocked at what I had seen and in the way that someone could be treated, not as a human being,' she said. 'I had a lot of sleepless nights after seeing it.

'We were watching a man dying in front of our own eyes and you want to help and you can't believe no one's helping him.'

Last year the Police Complaints Authority ordered an internal disciplinary hearing on charges of neglect of duty, but the policemen have been told their jobs and pensions are not at risk. It is, says Janet Alder, a situation that demands a public inquiry.

Humberside police have refused to release the original CCTV footage for the programme, but they showed it to the Rough Justi