Care goes on
trial
Speak of the
devil
What the
BBC did not tell us
How
the police trawl the innocent
Can a
whistleblower be wrong?
Crusade or
witch-hunt?
Do you care
to go to jail?
End this
cruel injustice
The new
injustices
Similar fact
evidence |
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A
change of course for the Home
Office?
One of the most significant aspects of the recent Home
Affairs Committee report (see below) is that its recommendations point in
exactly the opposite direction from those contained in the Government
white paper Justice for All. In a brief piece in the New
Statesman (which appears in an even briefer form in the magazine due
to a last-minute crisis of space) I explore this question.
It may be
noted that, although it has played a significant role in bringing the
dangers of police trawling to the attention of a wider public, the
Observer has not carried any coverage at all of the Home Affairs
Committee Report. Instead, the edition of 10 November devoted massive and
almost entirely uncritical coverage to the Government's
determination to rebalance the criminal justice system 'in favour of
victims'. In particular it carried a long, self-serving comment piece
by Tony Blair. Dissent from the government's view by those who point
out that the proposed 'reforms' will , if enacted, almost inevitably
lead to more miscarriages of justice, was relegated to the
online edition of the paper. Only there do we discover a joint statement by Liberty, Legal Action Group, the Criminal Bar Association
and The Bar Council opposing the government reforms. Only there do we find
an excellent article about
miscarriages of justice by postgraduate researcher Michael Naughton, which
was put online in July, but which was never published in the
main print edition of the
newspaper.
'A
new genre of miscarriages of
justice'
On
Thursday 31 October a long campaign, fought by hundreds of former care
workers and their supporters to expose what has been described as 'the
gravest series of miscarriages of justice in British legal
history', was finally vindicated by a House of Commons
report.
After conducting a three-month inquiry, in which it took
oral and written evidence from many individuals and organisations,
the Home Affairs Select Committee has concluded that what it calls 'a new
genre of miscarriages of justice' has arisen from 'the
over-enthusiastic pursuit' of allegations of abuse relating to children's
homes. 'I
am in no doubt,' said the Chairman of the Committee, Chris
Mullin, 'that a number of innocent people have been convicted and
that many other innocent people, who have not been convicted, have had
their lives ruined.' During the inquiry it was suggested by witnesses that
as many as a hundred former care workers had been wrongly convicted as
direct result of police trawling operations and the loop-holes in the laws
of evidence which these exploited.
The Committee's strong
report, which robustly questions many received views, recommends a series
of safeguards to protect people who are investigated during the course of
trawling operations. It calls for the compulsory audio or video recording
of police interviews with alleged victims, anonymity for the
accused and wider powers for the Criminal Cases Review Commission to
enable alleged miscarriages of justice to be reviewed. In a vital section
of its report which will be widely
welcomed by the wrongly accused (though it may be opposed by others)
it calls for the rules on 'similar fact evidence' to be
tightened.
One of the principal difficulties faced by those
accused during trawling operations is that over the last ten years, in a
series of ill-considered judgments, the House of Lords has progressively
removed restrictions on the admission of dangerous and highly prejudicial
evidence. As a result innocent defendants in trawling cases frequently
find themselves facing large numbers of horrific sexual allegations made
by as many as ten or even twenty complainants, all of which are false. No
jury can overcome the sheer emotional power of this evidence without
climbing a mountain of prejudice and few juries succeed in the
attempt. It is principally because of the relaxation of the rules of
evidence in this respect that increasing numbers of innocent care
workers have been convicted and given long prison
sentences.
In a radical proposal, which has
far-reaching implications, the Home Affairs Committee has now accepted the
view that the law on similar fact evidence should be reformed. It has
recommended to the Home Office that multiple allegations made
by different complainants should not be admitted into a trial before
a jury unless there are 'striking similarities' which justify their being
heard together. This would restore the cautious approach adopted by the
House of Lords in 1975 in the case of Boardman and undo the
dangerous relaxation of the evidence rules which was introduced
in 1991. What makes the Home Affairs Comittee recommendation
even more important is that has simultaneously urged that the presumption
favouring severance in sexual abuse cases should be restored. In other
words, where there are no striking similarities between allegations
these should be 'severed' and heard in separate trials in order to
avoid prejudicing
juries.
In a passage of the report which will be
welcomed by those innocent people who have already been convicted, the
Committee acknowledges that 'many of these recommendations are simply
'closing the door after the horse has bolted.' It is, says the Committee,
'all the more important, therefore, that the Criminal Cases Review
Commission and the appeal court take a robust approach to the review of
suspected wrongful convictions.'
For the full
Home Affairs Comittee press release, click here. Various stories have appeared about the report including
those of John Carvel in the Guardian, Philip
Johnston in the Daily Telegraph and John Silverman on the
BBC website.
The
full report, 'The Conduct of Investigations into Past Cases of Abuse
in Children's Homes', is now available online. The online
version includes a selection of the written submissions and full
transcripts of the oral evidence, including the evidence given by the
following witnesses: falsely accused teachers/care workers
(Rory O'Brien, Robin Reeves, Phil Fiddler and
Phil Craig), defence solicitors (scroll down page to Neil O'May, Chris Saltrese and Linzi
McDonald), personal injury compensation solicitors
(including the remarkable evidence of Peter
Garsden), 'experts' (Andrew
Parker, Gisli Gudjonsson, Janet Boakes, Bill Thompson), senior police
officers (including Terence Grange and
Gareth Tinnuche), journalists/authors (David Rose, Richard Webster and Bob Woffinden) and the
evidence of Claire Curtis-Thomas MP.
MPs speak out against
trawling
On Wednesday 16 October,
Claire Curtis-Thomas, the Member of Parliament for Crosby, won an
adjournment debate in the House of Commons on an issue in which she
has campaigned courageously and tenaciously over the last three years
- police trawling operations. The full Hansard report of her speech and of the ensuing debate
includes the very powerful contribution made by Edward Garnier, a QC who
is Conservative Member of Parliament for Harborough, and
a former shadow Attorney
General.
In his speech he related how two of his
constituents, a man and a woman who were both former care workers, were
arrested by the Leicestershire police during the course of Operation
Magnolia. They were then 'put in police cells, questioned and given the
firm impression by the police that they were guilty of heinous crimes':
'They were not told who their alleged victims were and were not
given sufficient detail to enable them to refute the allegations
coherently. Furthermore, they were
both summarily suspended by their employers, and it
was only earlier this year that they were both, almost casually, informed
by the police that they were not to be charged or prosecuted, and that
they no longer needed to answer to police bail. There was, they were told,
insufficient evidence for their cases to proceed.
'Of course, by
then the damage had been done. Those people had become pariahs. For more
than 18 months they were unable to go to work, to explain to their friends
and families why they were not going to work, to socialise and to go about
their daily lives as they had in the past. They were prisoners in their
own homes, terrified that the day would soon come when they would again be
summoned by the police to be interviewed, and on that occasion charged and
imprisoned on remand while the investigations against them were slowly
pursued.
'One of them became so traumatised by the experience
that he became suicidal and is still under the care of a psychiatrist. The
other had to receive professional counselling for the stress she has
endured. Both of them have had their faith in British justice and in the
police undermined, if not totally destroyed. Both are incapable of
offering their employers, the social services department, and their line
managers the respect that they once had for the institution and for the
people managing it.
'. . . My two constituents are like priests
who have lost their faith. They are ruined people contemplating ruined
lives and a future without hope.'
These two constituents, Edward
Garnier said, had provided him with stark and immediate examples of
the problem highlighted by Claire Curtis-Thomas. He went on to
offer a powerful and succinct view of the harm which is currently
being done by police trawling:It is interesting that
Operation Magnolia took place in Leicestershire, where the effect of the
Beck investigation is still felt. It might be
noted, however, that the view expressed by Edward
Garnier about Mark D'Arcy and Paul Gosling's account of the Beck
case in their 1998 book Abuse of Trust is very
different from the view I expressed in my TLS review
of the same
book.
The full Hansard record of the recent House of
Commons debate makes for interesting reading. But it also clearly
demonstrates the reluctance of the present government to face up to the
problem. The complaint made by Home Office minister John Denham that he
had not been given details of any case where people had been induced to
give evidence by the offer of compensation is particularly odd. One case
where compensation was clearly a motive was that involving the former
Southampton football manager David Jones. Another was described by Claire Curtis-Thomas herself in the
course of her speech, when she referred to a
remarkable incident where one complainant actually confessed in the
witness box that his evidence was 'a pack of lies' which he had made up in
order to get compsensation.
If, however, John Denham was
seeking an example where there is evidence that the police themselves
persuaded a witness to make false allegations by explicitly referring to
compensation, he is asking for something which is indeed difficult to
supply. For obvious reasons most evidence of such offers comes from
people who declined them and therefore did not go into the witness
box to make false
allegations.
It
remains to be seen whether Denham will continue to stonewall in this
manner when Home Affairs Select Commitee produce their report on trawling.
The report is now expected on 31
October.
…………………………………………………………
© Richard Webster, 2002
www.richardwebster.net
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