Fitted in: The Cardiff 3 and The Lynette White Inquiry by Satish Sekar (co-editors: Andy Soutter and Michele Bailey)
294 Pages: Publication Date - 1997, ISBN 0 - 9527325 - 0 - 5. Price: £10.99

On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1988, at about 1.45 to 1.50 a.m., a 20 year old white prostitute was brutally murdered in a run-down flat at 7 James Street, in the Butetown district of Cardiff, Wales. She was stabbed fifty times and her throat had been violently slashed. There were also injuries to her breasts and several other parts of her body. The renowned forensic pathologist, Professor Bernard Knight, conducted the autopsy. Even for Butetown “a nocturnal, upside down, topsy-turvy world where people carry knives as part of their clothing,” it was a horrific crime. Butetown (formerly known as Tiger Bay) is one of Britain’s oldest black communities, which was involved in the first Race Riot in British history in 1919. Lynette’s body was discovered only at 9.17 p.m., by a friend (also a prostitute), Learnne Vilday. In fact the flat in which the murder had been committed belonged to her, and she had given the keys, as she often did, to Lynette to “entertain” a client.

South Wales Police immediately got into action and established an incident room at Central Police Station, Cardiff. From an initial cast of thousands of potential suspects, they painstakingly narrowed down the investigation to eleven individuals, of whom six were eliminated on the basis of what would later appear to be dubious scientific evidence. The remaining five, Yusef Abdullahi, John Actie, Ronnie Actie, Steve Miller, and Tony Paris were tried for the murder, amidst allegations of intimidatory tactics employed by the police during interrogations. They came to be called the "Cardiff 5." Magistrates committed the Cardiff 5 for trial in February 1989, despite the fact that none of the forensic evidence found in the murder flat related them to the flat or the victim. The trial takes place only on the basis of coerced “confessional statements” on the part of one of the accused (Steve Miller), and confusing statements made by unreliable, biased, prosecution witnesses. The longest murder trial in British history ends (despite lack of credible evidence), with three men being convicted. They come to be known as the “Cardiff 3,” and comprise Steve Miller, Yusef Abdullahi, and Tony Paris. They go on appeal to a higher court amidst rising public concerns about the fairness of the investigation. On December 10th 1992, their convictions are quashed. Police however announce that they would not re-open the case unless new evidence was obtained.

Miscarriages of justice such as the one highlighted by the Cardiff 3 case, arise because of a judicial process which prefers to convict an accused rather than take the trouble of examining the truth about the crime. The police are not infrequently guilty of pressurizing potential witnesses until they give an account that helps them towards a solution of the crime. Often, on the basis of an unreliable and deeply flawed series of contentious allegations, individuals are detained and interrogated in an intimidatory manner to "fit in" to the police’s concept of the commission of the crime. Locking up a suspect sounds innocuous, but the purpose more often is to "break" a suspect's resistance, and coerce him to say something that he would not otherwise voluntarily do. Police lock-up is in reality an oppressive nightmare, in which the only relief from isolation and total lack of stimulation in a dark and dirty place is the time when the suspect is brought out for interrogation. The Cardiff 3 case is a classical example of such coercive tactics employed by police in most parts of the world in order to secure a conviction. In fact, in countries such as India, the situation is much worse than in countries like the UK or USA, where there are considerable safeguards against maltreatment of suspects. One shudders at the methods of interrogation commonly employed in many police stations of this country, which are often little more than rituals of physical torture. One wishes there were investigative journalists of the caliber of Satish Sekar to expose such inhuman methods of “criminal investigation” in India, while at the same time acknowledging the irony of his Indian origins!

This book has all the makings of a classic, containing as it does explicit information for a definitive indictment of the so-called adversarial system of justice practiced in several countries of the world. It should be a mandatory addition to Police Academy libraries, and must find a prominent place in all lawyer’s offices, so that it may serve as a grim reminder of what can go wrong when shortcuts are taken, or personal bias is allowed to creep in, while pursuing the investigation of a serious crime.