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.

Precedents:

Meanwhile, Burdon knew that the public wanted answers. His force had made history. They were the first to vindicate victims of a terrible miscarriage of justice by identifying and convicting the real murderer, but it raised other questions? How had it been allowed to happen? Who was responsible?

Other miscarriages of justice had been investigated previously – some notorious ones. On October 19^th 1989 the convictions of the Guildford Four (Patrick Armstrong, Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson) were quashed by an enraged Court of Appeal. They had served fifteen years for the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings – over a decade of which had been despite the real bombers admitting their guilt and the innocence of the Guildford Four.

Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Style, Detective Sergeant John Donaldson and Detective Constable Vernon Attwell stood trial for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, but that trial turned into a retrial of the Guildford Four, centring on an almost unintelligible argument on whether rough typed notes were a draft plan for perjury. Stronger evidence such as the suppression of alibi evidence and intimidation of witnesses was ignored.

This set a pattern for the prosecution of police officers in miscarriage of justice cases – one that proved disastrous. On the very day that the release of the Guildford Four shook British justice out of its complacency, the appeal court granted bail to former police officer Thomas (Ged) Corley. His convictions for conspiracy to rob were quashed in 1990.

Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Roberts and Detective Constable Kevin Ryan stood trial for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice after several of Manchester’s criminal fraternity – armed robbers, turned supergrasses were tried and convicted of perjury. Inspector Peter Jackson was deemed unfit to stand trial. Ryan admitted a lesser offence – his wife worked for Corley’s lawyers and supplied him with confidential legal papers that police used against him. Both were acquitted of the conspiracy charges, which they had denied.

Police officers stood trial in other cases too. Despite the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad being disbanded by then Chief Constable Geoffrey Dear in 1989, prosecutions failed. And in London two officers were acquitted despite Esda testing proving that incriminating so called admissions  had been inserted into the record of interviews with Winston Silcott in the Keith Blakelock Inquiry.

Three South Wales Police detectives were acquitted of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice over the wrongful convictions of Paul and Wayne Darvell in 1994. That occurred despite clear evidence that officers had lied about the use of leading questions and that admissions had been contemporaneously recorded. Esda testing proved that false. They had even been written in notebooks issued weeks after the interviews took place. Nevertheless, the three were acquitted.

This was the history that South Wales Police had to overcome if they wanted to regain public confidence and make more history in the process.