Judicial Concern “I have to be very careful about commenting on a case that I tried,” Lord Justice (Sir Anthony) Hooper told me exclusively. “There were a whole series of quote cell unquote confessions. I, like many judges, have always been concerned about the evidential value of cell confessions. One of my problems has always been that it is extremely difficult to get back and find what led this person to come forward and I myself have written about this elsewhere. These kind of witnesses who are clearly suspect witnesses, even from their previous convictions leaving them in prison – their desire to help in circumstances which they are about to receive – knew very little about what’s happened.”
Hooper remains concerned, but proposes a solution that should be welcomed, at least in part. “ I would like to see all of those interviews with those kind of witnesses at least recorded by an officer of sufficient rank that one can be sure that it’s been done properly, because I can’t say that all cell confessions cannot be relied on, but it’s very difficult,” he says. “In the Damilola Taylor case there was a young man who gave evidence of a cell confession that as a result received a sentence of about one year or eighteen months, where the minimum he would otherwise have received would have been four years, so there’s all kinds of wrong for that kind of confession, but after there has been a clear miscarriage of justice, if one has an inquiry, that might identify whatever it was that went wrong by reliance on a cell confession in that case.”
Learning from Errors He was the trial judge in the case against four boys, who cannot be named for legal reasons. The boys were vindicated, or at least should have been in 2006, by the convictions for manslaughter of original suspects Danny and Ricky Preddie. Despite the vindication of the four boys there has been no inquiry into this aspect despite a police trawl of Feltham Young Offenders Institute searching for such evidence.
“I think in Damilola Taylor there were about twelve or thirteen cell confessions, some of which were obviously made in the sense that young boys were bragging in order to preserve their integrity,” says Hooper. “Some were so peculiar that the jury might have had difficulty believing that they were ever made.”
So what would he like to see done about various issues such as aftercare for victims of miscarriages of justice for those wrongfully accused, the vindicated and cell confessions? “I like your idea,” Hooper says. “Putting the strands together, I can see the need for care; I can see the need for compensation; I can see the need for an apology and I can see the need for at least some investigation into what went wrong so that we can learn from our mistakes.”
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