Earl Moxam, Senior Gleaner Writer 
REUTERS - Tony Blair offered a public apology for what has now been acknowledged to be one of that country's most scandalous miscarriages of justice..
BRITISH PRIME Minister Tony Blair was moved on Wednesday (February 9) to offer a public apology for what has now been acknowledged
to be one of that country's most scandalous miscarriages of
justice.
The prime minister was
commenting on the wrongful jailing of 11 people for Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb attacks on pubs in Guildford and Woolwich in 1974. His apology for the "ordeal and injustice" to which the detainees had been subjected came 16 years after they were released from prison.
Mr. Blair reportedly first
apologised to members of the Conlon and Maguire families in his private room at Westminster. Then, in a statement recorded for television, the prime minister said the families deserved "to
be completely and publicly
exonerated".
For one of the Guildford Four, Gerry Conlon wrongly convicted of planting the bombs this was a moment of great vindication for him and his family. It was difficult not to share his pain, as he tried to explain, to whoever would listen, what it had been like to bear the scars of being branded a terrorist, being deprived of his liberty for 15 years, and the continuing agony of the experience trapped in the memory of the allegations, the incarceration, the lost years.
APPEAL TURNED DOWN
Their appeal against their 1976 conviction was turned down. Then, in 1989 their case was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Home Secretary. The director of public prosecutions confirmed that he was no longer interested in supporting their convictions, which were consequently quashed by the court. This decision was made after tests on police documents contradicted police evidence that the crucial interviews were recorded contemporaneously. It had by then become clear that the hand written police notes had been done after the typed records of the interviews.
According to a BBC report at the time of their release, the investigation into the case, "considered to be the biggest ever miscarriage of justice in Britain", was carried out by Avon and Somerset Police, who found serious flaws in the way Surrey police noted the confessions of the four.
The confession of Patrick Armstrong, the report said, was central to the investigation and the inquiry concluded "the notes taken were not written up immediately and officers may have colluded in the wording of the statements".
As tragic as it is, the ordeal of the Guildford Four is only one of a long string of documented cases of miscarriages of justice in the United Kingdom, most of them so infamous they have become known by their numeric designations.
Travel back in time with me to January 28, 1953 to witness an execution. The star attraction: eighteen year-old Derek William Bentley. The hanging, incredibly, came just one month after the young man had been convicted for the murder of Police Constable Sidney Miles, on December 11, 1952!
Bentley had been convicted as an accomplice to the crime under the principle of joint enterprise, during a failed burglary attempt; never mind the fact that Bentley was being held by a police
officer, metres away from where his accomplice was when the other man fired the fatal shot.
Throw in the fact that Bentley had a mental deficiency which saw him functioning at the level of an 11-year-old a detail that was kept from the jury and the miscarriage of justice looms even larger.
It took Bentley's family and human rights groups 40 years of lobbying before Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon, but limited to his sentence. But the advocates did not stop there in their quest to have his name cleared. Finally, in August 1998, Bentley was cleared of the murder conviction by the Court of Appeal. The only problem was that he was not there to learn of his exoneration, having been killed by the state 45 years earlier!
THE MAGUIRE SEVEN
Fast forward to 1976 and meet the Maguire Seven. The defendants, most of them members of the Maguire family, were convicted in 1976 of an offence of possessing explosive substances linked by the prosecution to bombings in London and Guildford. Their application for leave to appeal was refused in 1977.
They spent the next 13 years languishing in prison, and it was only after the convictions of the Guildford Four had been quashed that the Home Secretary also referred the case to the Court of Appeal. The Court of Appeal quashed their convictions in 1992. There were two main grounds on which their convictions were quashed. The first was the failure of the prosecution to disclose to the defence certain scientific evidence, which amounted to material irregularity. Secondly, the scientific evidence left open the possibility that traces of nitro-glycerine found on the defendants and in their house came from an innocent source, which rendered the verdicts "unsafe and unsatisfactory". The Court of Appeal's decision to quash the convictions came only after the defendants had spent 13 years in prison; too later for one of them who died there.
In 1975, public attention was focused on the Birmingham Six. They were convicted of murder by causing explosions in a public house in Birmingham. They maintained throughout their trial that they had been beaten and that their 'confessions' were false. Their appeal against conviction was dismissed. In 1987, Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, responding to public pressure, sent the case back to the Court of Appeal on the grounds that fresh scientific evidence had shown that the defendants had been beaten after arrest. Their appeal was dismissed. In 1990, the Home Secretary referred the case to the Court of Appeal again in the light of further fresh evidence. Finally, in 1991, their convictions were quashed, but with 16 productive years having been lost.
In 1992, Judith Ward, the woman convicted for the so-called M62 Bombing, secured her freedom in the Court of Appeal, 18 years after she was sent to prison, having been convicted in 1974 for murder and causing an explosion. Her case was sent back to the Court of Appeal in 1991 for two main reasons: that the forensic science service had failed to disclose the results of tests that were favourable to the defendant and that there were other failures
of disclosure by the director of public prosecutions, the police and prosecuting counsel. Then there was the small matter of the defendant's mental condition a form of personality disorder, which rendered her confession unreliable. Her conviction was ultimately deemed unsafe and unsatisfactory.
Then came the Tottenham Three the defendants convicted in 1986 of the murder of a police officer during disturbances at Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, North London. In 1991, their case was referred to the Court of Appeal and their convictions were quashed, mainly because the scientific tests on the notes of the police interview showed that some parts of the alleged records had been written at different times.
THE CARDIFF THREE
The Cardiff Three were released after their 1990 conviction for the murder of a Cardiff prostitute was quashed. The Court of Appeal found that the tenor and length of the police interview was such that they should be excluded from evidence. The lord chief justice held that the techniques of interrogation used by the police amounted to oppression under the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act.
There are common themes
running through these cases: Concoction of evidence by forensic scientists and police officers; non-disclosure of
evidence by forensic scientists and non-disclosure by prosecution of evidence that would be helpful to the defence; and oppressive
conduct by the police during
questioning, often involving with violence.
The role of the police in Britain again came under the public microscope in the Stephen Lawrence case, which had
significant resonance here in Jamaica.
In 1993, Stephen Lawrence, a teenager of Jamaican parentage, was stabbed to death by a group of white thugs while waiting
at a bus stop. The London Metropolitan Police Service, commonly known as Scotland Yard, was severely criticised for its slow and insensitive response to the mugging. A judicial inquiry headed by former High Court Judge, Sir William Macpherson, in its 1999 report, accused the Metropolitan Police Service of 'institutional racism'.
IRREGULARITIES
The report detailed a series of irregularities in how the aftermath of the stabbing was handled: failure to administer proper first aid at the scene of the attack; failure to properly search for evidence and suspects; failure to properly log and investigate tip-offs about the identity of the killers; and failure to treat the family of the slain youth with respect and sensitivity.
Members of civil society, responding to these and other instances of miscarriage of
justice in the U.K., brought pressure to bear on the government; so much so that in March 1997, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) was established under the 1995 Criminal Appeal Act. Its mandate was
to take on the onerous task of sifting through all the complaints of abuse and irregularities in England and Wales, and Northern Ireland, and determine those that should be referred to the Court of Appeal. (A similar body was set up in Scotland in 1999).
As at December 31, 2004, there had been 7,346 applications to the CCRC. Of that number 6,606 have been completed, with 264 cases being referred to the Court of Appeal. The court has already heard 209 of those referred and has quashed the convictions in 144 of the cases referred to it, while upholding the convictions in 64, while its decision in one has been reserved.
More than anything else, these documented cases reinforce one universal truth that abuse of power by the police, in the judicial process, by agents of the state, by politicians, and elsewhere in society will thrive in the absence of a vigilant civil society movement, and an alert and free press.
Here in Jamaica, the country will ultimately be the better for the work of the human rights activists whose efforts, for decades, (flaws and all) have served to turn the spotlight on such abuses.
Equally, improvements must be recognised and documented. The role of the press in presenting both sides is invaluable.
