Nearly eighteen years ago I got involved in – some no doubt would say obsessed over – a case that turned out to be one of Britain's most shameful miscarriages of justice. The murder of Lynette White was an appalling crime that involved gratuitous brutality, which continued even after the unfortunate woman had lost her battle for life. After ten months Yusef Abdullahi, John and Ronnie Actie, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris (the Cardiff Five) were arrested and charged with her murder. The investigating officers celebrated their success, but there was a problem and a big one at that, despite obtaining three convictions two years later. It was a glaring miscarriage of justice.

There was nothing that happened in this case that did not occur in many others too, but it was very unusual for so much to go wrong in the one case and for all the safeguards in the criminal justice system to combine to be so ineffective at the same time. Had this occurred in a different era three innocent men could have been forced to make the walk to the gallows to pay the ultimate price for a crime that they did not commit.1 A case was built around pre-conceived ideas of what the police believed had happened and evidence that did not support that belief was either minimised or even ignored. Pressure was put on witnesses until they gave accounts that allowed the police to arrest their chosen suspects. This set in motion a chain of events that resulted in a preventable miscarriage of justice.

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The single most important piece of evidence in the case of the Cardiff Five was Stephen Miller's confession. It was absolutely false – it always was – but now that the real killer Jeffrey Gafoor has pleaded guilty and admitted that he acted alone there is no doubt at all. Miller's confession should not have been admissible against anyone as it had been obtained through oppressive interviewing and he was an extremely vulnerable young man; he was among those most likely to confess to a crime he did not commit, especially if interviewed aggressively, because he was abnormally suggestible – more likely than the average person to agree to something put to them whether true or not.

It didn't mean that he would agree with everything put to him, which was the standard on suggestibility that David Elfer QC mistakenly demanded. Miller had poor socialisation skills, but like many others in his situation he found a way to cope and covered up his vulnerability, because it embarrassed him and he had an abnormally low intelligence quotient. To the untrained eye the fact that Miller coped with everyday life can and did lead to the mistaken belief that he was not vulnerable at all. He needed lawyers who understood his vulnerabilities and provided him with the high standard of defence that he required as he wasn't capable of taking responsibility for the conduct of his defence himself. He had no option but to trust them to do their best for him. It proved to be a huge mistake.