Investigating Miscarriages of Justice Thoroughly – Part One

Background:

Thirteen police officers who worked on one of Britiain’s most notorious miscarriages of justice will be tried for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice next year. It is the first time that so many officers have been charged over a case where innocent people were wrongly accused anywhere in the world and follows a unique investigation of a miscarriage of justice. Unusually this process has been conducted by the same force that got it wrong originally – South Wales Police.

In the early hours of St Valentine’s Day 1988 Lynette White was murdered in particularly brutal fashion by Jeffrey Gafoor. It was then the most brutal murder of its type in Welsh history, involving over fifty stab wounds. Ten months later five innocent men – Yusef Abdullahi, John Actie, Ronnie Actie, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris – were charged with her murder. It was the beginning of one of Britiain’s most notorious miscarriages of justice – a journey that has yet to end over twenty years later.

A Long Struggle 

Two trials later the Actie cousins were acquitted and the Cardiff Three had no choice but to begin life sentences for a crime that they did not commit in November 1990. They were freed on appeal two years later – their convictins were unsafe and unsatisfactory. Time would tell that these convictions were far worse than unsafe and unsatisfactory – they were an outrage to every concept of justice.

After the convictions were quashed Assistant Chief Constable Bob Evans conducted an internal review. He concluded that his officers had done nothing wrong. He was wrong. Voice of the Service, the organ of the Police Federation congratulated the then Chief Constable of South Wales Police, the late Robert Lawrence, for defending his officers ‘so unfairly criticised,’ by Lord Taylor, the Lord Chief Justice at the time, during the appeal of the Cardiff Three.

The interviewing of Stephen Miller had been strongly condemned by the appeal judges in 1992. Miller had been ‘bullied and hectored.’ His will had been overborne and a demonstrably false confession was obtained – one that should have been detected far earlier in the crimal justice process.

Instead police buried their heads in the sand at that time and the whole system failed to investigate issues of how such confessions had been obtained and how unsafe convictions are obtained and relied on through them. The introduction of guidelines on ethical interviewing helped to prevent repetition in theory at least, but what about redressing previous wrongs and not just in this case?

Ground-breaking:

Despite the endorsement of the appeal judges, Miller did not make a complaint about police conduct. That said more about his lack of trust of the police complaints system at that time than it did about their treatment of him. He later said that “they stripped him bare – ripped him apart emotionally.”

The inquiry was re-opened twice in 1995 and again in 1999 before justice was finally delivered to the memory of Lynette White. The second investigation made history in Britain. On July 4^th 2003 Jeffrey Gafoor became the first British murderer to be brought to justice after a miscarriage of justice.

Then Chief Constable of South Wales Police Sir Anthony Burdon orderered an investigation into how and why the miscarriage of justice had occurred. Operation Rubicon had sweeping powers and a mandate to get to the truth of what had happened. There were no restrictions on who they could investigate or arrest even. It became the most thorough investigation of a miscarriage of justice ever – the blueprint of how such cases should be investigated.