Investigating Miscarriages of Justice Thoroughly – Part Six

Favours:

Police officers had faced trial over miscarriage of justice cases before, but the likelihood of securing convictions was slim – impossible even unless juries believed that the original defendants really were innocent, but prosecuting lawyers and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) did not see the need to establish this first in such cases. It contributed to a trail off failed proosecutions – wasting huge resources in the process.

But these prosecutions depended on the evidence gathered and that raised other issues. Could the police be trusted to investigate allegations of criminal conduct by their colleagues? The quality of evidence gathered and presented at the trials referred to in Part Five suggested that the was a problem in the evidence gathering phase of the process. The presentation of evidence by lawyers suggested another problem.

If conclusions can be drawn from the prosecution of Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style over the Guildford Four’s case, they were losing jurors in the presentation of the evidence and helped to do the job of defence barristers. The former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was called by the Crown at the request of defence barristers. Why?

They could have called their own witnesses. They took the Right to Silence and their strategy was to attack Patrick Armstrong in particular for not giving evidence. That was not his fault. The Crown did not call him. The same happened to Winston Silcott. They drummed it into jurors that Armstrong – the man who should have been chafing at the bit to give evidence of how he had been treated by police – wasn’t there.

Investigating Miscarriages of Justice Thoroughly – Part Five

Too Late:

On July 7^th 2003 the then Chief Constable of South Wales Police Sir Anthony Burdon apologised to the Cardiff Five for their ordeal and to Lynette’s family too. For some it was already too late. Tony Paris’ father died just before the then Lord Justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, quashed his conviction in 1992. His sister Esther also passed away without seeing him vindicated.

Yusef Abdullahi’s elder brother Rashid took his own life in prison and Terry White, who opposed the investigation being reopened in 1999, died never knowing that he had been wrong. He could have spent his final years serving a life sentence for the murder of an innocent man. Enraged that John Actie was free and Lynette dead, White confronted him with gun.

He could have fired it and killed Actie. Had he done so, he would have thrown his life away and for what? Actie was an innocent man. These wrongs cannot be redressed. They are victims of this case who died without knowing that Jeffrey Gafoor cheated them all – content to allow innocent men to pay for his crime, laughing in the face of society, whose criminal justice system treated him more leniently than the innocent men whose lives he ruined.