Most of us can afford to take the moral high ground; insisting that we would do the right thing and tell the truth no matter what the consequences were, knowing that in all probability we will never actually have to make that choice. If we were told that our baby child would be taken into care if we didn't do exactly as we were told by police – the very people who she should have been able to turn for help – would any of us really have done things differently? She put not only herself first, but her infant child as well – ahead of the rights and needs of men who she thought could be innocent, but did not know for sure. Shouldn't the law – a criminal justice system that is supposed to reflect the behaviour of reasonable men and women – have taken this into account?

Nevertheless, it should not have mattered. The right thing should have been done, but not by Vilday. She should never have been placed in that position and nor should Psaila or Grommek. Their statements were so unreliable that they should have been rejected as utterly implausible in a script for a television drama, let alone in real life. The CPS should have prevented this outrageous travesty of justice from ever wasting a court's time let alone wrecking innocent lives, so when does it take responsibility? It failed miserably to investigate their claims with any degree of competence. Psaila made an astonishing outburst at the committal hearing in 1989. “How many fucking times do I have to tell you, I wasn't there?” she yelled. At the time the CPS accepted that she was talking about visiting the medical room at the court for stomach pains, when she was clearly talking about the flat where the murder took place. Why did they accept such arrant nonsense? Why do they get away without proper investigation of their role in procuring a disgraceful travesty of justice? Vilday, Psaila and Grommek not only took responsibility for their part in this miscarriage of justice, but are paying the price The CPS has not even had the decency to apologise for allowing innocent men to suffer. Even Jeffrey Gafoor has done that.

*****

Investigating officers cajoled: bullied, browbeat, manipulated and abused Vilday, Psaila and Grommek until they got what they wanted. During interviews that were recorded by contemporaneous notes – not taped as would occur now – Psaila told lies for the first time to get police off her back, but they were not what her interrogators wanted. “To suggest names to her was wholly wrong,” said Nicholas Dean QC, prosecuting,.in a summation that all three defence QCs acknowledged was scrupulously fair. Dean ruled out collusion between the witnesses and Paul Atkins. They had been literally held in a way that indicated they could not leave, but shocking as these concessions undoubtedly are, they do not constitute duress as the law stands.

Is this just and fair? Dean accepted that every accusation of police malpractice that they had made was true. These included threats of violence, being falsely prosecuted and imprisoned and of an infant child being effectively orphaned while his mother was in jail. If this is not duress, does it not bring the law into disrepute that people can be bullied into doing something wrong that they would not normally do due to scandalous behaviour that in this case came from the very people they should have been able to turn to for protection and then be prosecuted for doing precisely that?

The jailing of Learnne Vilday, Angela Psaila and Mark Grommek under these circumstances strikes at the very heart of justice. More lives will be wrecked, including innocent ones, such as Vilday's daughter and for what? They are being punished nearly twenty years later for doing something they never willingly chose to do. They were treated disgracefully by a few police officers, especially former Detective Inspector Graham Mouncher. Where is the justice in sending them to jail for a crime they were forced to commit? If this isn't duress, then the law needs to be changed.

Nothing can ever return the years that were stolen from the Cardiff Five, but how does piling a second injustice on top of the original miscarriage of justice satisfy anything, but a desire for revenge on the most vulnerable of all those involved in procuring a scandalous miscarriage of justice. If the interests of justice cannot be tempered with mercy in circumstances like this, then let us at least be honest; this was the revenge of hindsight, when even a modicum of foresight and integrity should have prevented it from happening in the first place.

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (December 20th 2008)