There was other evidence that proved Miller's confession was arrant nonsense as well, all of which was available to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), but it failed to take any of the opportunities it had to uphold the law and refuse to rely on it, despite its duty to only tender evidence that was reliable and lawfully obtained. The lead barrister for the prosecution, David Elfer QC, demanded ludicrous standards on suggestibility and even on oppression from Miller. Elfer thought that Miller couldn't say that he was happy to continue during interviews and claim he was bullied later. The Court of Criminal Appeal , headed by the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, later set him straight on both points, but it should never have come to that. Miller's confession was unlawfully obtained and it was false – demonstrably so. There were several safeguards – none of which had protected as vulnerable a suspect as one could find, but Miller's confession had another unusual feature.

After Miller was convicted – a time when his confession was supposed to play no further part in proceedings – the jury returned to ask a question that perplexed the judge. Could they convict a person of murder if they believed that he had been at the flat but had not taken part in the murder itself? The judge – the late Mr Justice Leonard – was mystified as there was no evidence to support such a belief, but he had underestimated the impact of Miller's confession. Six minutes of tape eighteen of Miller's interviews had the Actie cousins outside of the room where White was murdered, but inside the flat, while the other three were inside. Interestingly that passage did not even contain an account of Miller stabbing her himself – mere presence in the room while the murder was committed was apparently enough to convict him

It was perhaps the only case where it was crystal clear that the jury had ignored the law and relied on it to convict innocent men, despite the judge's directions without that fact being confirmed by a juror as later occurred in the case of Jimmy Robinson, Michael Hickey, Vincent Hickey and Pat Molloy (the four men wrongfully convicted of the 1978 killing of teenage newspaper-boy Carl Bridgewater). As such it showed that ordinary people – a jury of Miller's peers – also relied on his confession uncritically. Their behaviour is at least understandable. After all, as far as they were concerned a judge and lawyers, who knew the law better than they, found the confession reliable and lawfully obtained. They couldn't have known that it was utterly false and had been obtained unlawfully.

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (December 27th 2008)