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About the Project: Angela Grobben: Human Rights Correspondent A life long human rights campaigner Angela's organisat... http://t.co/0pkXFeTy

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May

Ludicrous

Written by Satish Sekar

A Sad History
Many of the major miscarriages of justice had featured cell confessions. Mervin 'Tex' Ritter was just one of many prisoners who lied through his teeth to frame an innocent man. After eighteen years of wrongful imprisonment Jimmy Robinson, the late Pat Molloy, Michael Hickey and Vincent Hickey were cleared on appeal of the September 1978 murder of teenage newspaper-boy, Carl Bridgewater. Ritter's lies went unpunished.

Wales' longest serving victims of a miscarriage of justice, the Newsagent's Three (Darren Hall, Michael O'Brien and Ellis Sherwood), have good reason to distrust such evidence, as their case involved alleged cell confessions too. It was not the most important evidence against Sherwood and O'Brien, but bolstered the case against them. They were not alone. In legal terms, at the time, Tony Paris could not have been convicted of the murder of Lynette White without the evidence of Ian Massey that Paris had allegedly confessed to him. There were almost too many to count in the Damilola Taylor Inquiry, one at least, resulting in total incredulity from the trial judge.

Senseless
There are many other examples too numerous to mention. Cell confessions are inherently unreliable. They should never be uncorroborated or the central plank of a case for obvious reasons. If they fit that criteria, then the case was weaker than it should have been at the point of arrest and charging and if that is true, then police had not gathered sufficient evidence to justify a conviction and the Crown Prosecution Service should not have decided to prosecute on the grounds of insufficient credible evidence.

Why would a prisoner, against whom there is not sufficient evidence to justify a conviction, suddenly decide to confess to another prisoner, knowing full well that there are no safeguards governing how their alleged confession was obtained or noted, that there was no benefit to the prisoner confessing, but plenty to the prison informer and that depending on the offence, they risked exposure to a long term of imprisonment or worse. It makes no sense whatsoever, but judges refuse to give up on such evidence.

Tailored Opportunities
The case of Michael Stone is a classic example. His convictions for the attempted murder of 9 year-old Josie Russell and the murders of her mother and sister, Dr Lin and Megan, depended on the testimony of prison informer and self-confessed perjurer, Damien Daley. There were no safeguards whatsoever and Daley had the means and opportunity to concoct his story. Despite this, the Court of Criminal Appeal refused the opportunity to develop the law to provide much needed safeguards.

“This Court has said repeatedly that a summing-up should be tailored by the judge to the circumstances of the particular case,” the then Vice-President of the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice (Sir Christopher) Rose said. “If an alleged confession, for whatever reason, would not have been easy to invent, it would be absurd to require the judge to tell the jury that confessions are often easy to concoct.” This begs the question of what the criteria are to establish difficulty to concoct?

Devil in the Detail
“The alleged confession contained many points of detail which it would not have been easy to invent,” Rose said without detailing what these points were and why it was difficult to invent them. “Some were in the public domain, and others were capable of being deduced from material in the public domain. But the jury heard evidence both as to how much access Daley had to what was in the public domain and enabling them to assess how easy or difficult relevant deductions would have been for him, in the time scale available to him. In the circumstances, a direction that cell confessions are easy to concoct would have served no useful purpose and we reject the submission that it should have been given.”

Rose and his colleagues Sir Alan Moses and Sir Robert Walker singularly failed to demonstrate why it was so difficult for Daley to fabricate his account. By Daley's own account there were three days in the segregation unit between the alleged confession and his making the statement to police. This was ample time to plan what he would say in his statement. In other words, it was far from difficult to concoct his account if he used those three days to prepare what he would say.

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