Fitted-In » Albert Pierrepoint

A Heinous Murder Most Foul

Satish Sekar — Sat, 09 May 2015 15:20:20 +0000

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (February 27th 2013)
Despicable
Despicable does not begin to describe what happened in one of Walesʼ most notorious miscarriages of justice. The killer of 45-year-old wages clerk Granville Jenkins, Tahir Gass, was a suspect in the murder of Lily Volpert who was killed two years earlier in March 1952. Volpert, like Jenkins, had been a victim of a brutal knife-crime. Gass was interviewed as a suspect by Detective Inspector Ludon Roberts (now deceased) for Volpertʼs murder and released without charge before the arrest of the tragic innocent Mahmood Mattan.
Within six months of Volpertʼs murder Mattan was judicially murdered by the British state. Forty-six years later the Court of Appeal acknowledged that a terrible miscarriage of justice had occurred. Less than two years after Mattan went to the gallows for a crime he did not commit Gass killed Jenkins in a staggeringly similar way. Gass always carried a knife because he had an irrational fear of rape and was clearly in desperate need of psychiatric help.
Volpert was robbed while Jenkins was not. So what? The police [this was before South Wales Police was formed], criminal justice system and British state either knew about the similarities in these cases and police interest in Gass in both murders from 1954, or they should have. However, Mattanʼs family and lawyers were kept in the dark about this damning evidence. The police failed to disclose their interest in Gass to Mattanʼs defence at his trial, appeal and subsequent attempts to re-open the case until Bernard de Maid, who had taken up the case for Mattanʼs family, found the evidence nearly half a century later.
In 1969 the case was reviewed and the then Home Secretary James Callaghan – later to become Prime Minister and later still Baron Callaghan of Cardiff – refused to refer it back for appeal. The full extent of the Gass evidence was not known by Mattanʼs supporters, but the crucial witness Harold Cover – later exposed as incapable of belief – was exposed as a thug in 1969. Cover had tried to kill one of his daughters in a very similar manner to the murder of Lily Volpert. Coverʼs initial description fitted Gass and not Mattan. The City of Cardiff Police were fully aware of this and concealed their interest in Gass from Mattan and his lawyers. They also failed to find a crucial witness that a national newspaperʼs journalist found easily.
Guilty!
At his trial Mattan was described as a ʻsemi-civilised savage – a half-child of natureʼ, and that was by his defence barrister T. Rhys-Roberts. A then 12-year-old girl Joyce Sullivan had seen a man at the crime-scene at the relevant time. Police arranged for Sullivan to see Mattan. She stood very close to him and told police, “That is not the man”. She was ignored.
There were other serious discrepancies in the case against the Somali, but these failed to register too. It was plain that Mattan did not fully understand the court proceedings and his command of English was very poor. No interpreter was provided. Confident in his innocence he trusted British justice to reach the right verdict, but he stood no chance.
Rhys-Roberts invited the jury not to believe his client, but to rely on prosecution witnesses instead. Those witnesses supported the defence case in parts, but such tactics were outrageous. The former Lord Justice of Appeal Sir Frederick Lawton said that if a lawyer had used the terminology that Rhys-Roberts had in his court, he would have stopped the trial and reprimanded the barrister. There were no sanctions on Rhys-Roberts and Mattan, unsurprisingly, was convicted. The jury reached their verdict – the wrong one – very quickly.
The case went to appeal, but with the same counsel. Rhys-Robertsʼ appeal on Mattanʼs behalf did not mention his own utterly wretched performance at trial and was so unpersuasive that the appeal judges told Crown Counsel Edmund Davies QC that he neednʼt bother answering Rhys-Robertsʼ points. Davies was later ennobled. He was also the trial judge in the Great Train Robbery case, dying five years before Mattanʼs long overdue exoneration. Shortly after Mattanʼs application for leave to appeal was dismissed in August 1952. Albert Pierrepoint was engaged to hang Mattan.
Without a Hitch
Mattan was hanged by Pierrepoint on September 3rd 1952. He had been convicted in July and his appeal was dismissed the following month. The rush to judgement and to the gallows occurred with indecent haste. The Governor of Cardiff Prison Colonel Beak claimed that the execution occurred without a hitch. There was a hitch and a big one at that. The last hanging in Cardiff Prison was of an innocent man.
The Gass evidence was mentioned at Mattanʼs posthumous appeal in 1998 – 46 years too late. It had been concealed for almost half a century. If anyone tells you capital punishment is necessary, let them read the evidence in the Volpert case. Let them read the 1998 judgement in the Court of Criminal Appeal and let them remember Mahmood Mattan.
Our criminal justice system stands accused – condemned – of the judicial murder of Mahmood Mattan. And if you truly believe in capital punishment, then you must be consistent. The state and its functionaries that perpetrated this monstrous injustice killed an innocent man. Should they not face the gallows for a heinous murder most foul – the judicial murder of an innocent man, Mahmood Mattan?

Deterrence – The Ultimate Failure

Satish Sekar — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 21:25:20 +0000

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (October 19^th 2010)

Nothing Special

At first glance there is nothing special about December 16^th 1950, but it proved to be one of the most important dates in the history of British justice. It was the day that the veneer of deterrence was stripped away from capital punishment in Britain once and for all. James Ronald Robertson was not just another prisoner who paid the ultimate price for his crime – he was a special category of person who suffered capital punishment.

Robertson was hanged that morning in Barlinie Prison in Glasgow, but he was unique in the annals of people executed in Britain in the twentieth century. If ever a person should have been deterred from committing murder by the death penalty, it should have been Robertson. He was perhaps the most important guilty person executed in Britain in the twentieth century.

Why? Because James Robertson was the only serving police officer to be hanged in Britain in the twentieth century. So what brought a law enforcement officer to face the long drop at the hands of Albert Pierrepoint and his assistant Steve Wade?

The Road to Infamy

Catherine McCluskey died on July 29^th 1950. She had seemingly been the victim of a callous hit and run driver. Her body was left where she fell in the road. It soon became clear to Constable William Kevan that there was more to this than met the eye at first glance. There were no tyre-marks in the road indicating a screeching halt. There was no glass in the road from a sudden stop and McCluskey’s injuries were not consistent with an accidental hit and run.

It was a deliberate murder, which had been badly staged to look like an accident. The killer had not only hit McCluskey, but reversed over her. It could not have been an accident. The woman was soon identified as McCluskey when a friend reported that she had failed to return home to pick up her baby after reports of the death was published. Kevan was told that McCluskey had been having a relationship with a police officer named Robertson.

Investigations established that Robertson was supposed to be on duty on July 29^th, but between 11.15 and 1.30 that night he absented himself from his beat with Constable Dugald Moffat. The lack of an alibi soon became the least of Robertson’s problems. His car was a stolen vehicle with false number plates: the exhaust was damaged and the under-carriage was stained with blood and human hairs. He had run over McCluskey twice.

Disgrace

Charged with vehicle offences and murder, Robertson denied everything at his trial in November 1950. His defence on the car theft charges defied credibility. He claimed to have found it and driven it. A few days later he found the log elsewhere as well. Quite why a police officer would think this behaviour, even if true, was acceptable seems to have escaped him. They were still crimes.

His explanation of McCluskey’s death defied belief. He had met her that night. They argued and he drove off, abandoning her in the road. He then thought better of it and went back for her accidentally reversing into her. This explanation fails to explain how he managed to accidentally run over her twice. It took the jury just over an hour to decide that Constable James Robertson was a murderer.

The Ultimate Punishment

Robertson’s week long trial ended in Lord Justice Keith having the dubious distinction of sentencing a serving police officer to death. The execution was scheduled to take place on December 4^th, but a stay was granted while Robertson appealed. After the appeal was dismissed a new date was set, less than two weeks after the original date.

There was no reprieve, so Robertson became the only serving police officer to face the gallows in Britain in the last century. He was just 33 years-old when he demonstrated that capital punishment was not even a sufficient deterrent to prevent a police officer abandoning his beat to commit murder.

The allegedly ultimate deterrent had failed to stop a serving police officer unlawfully cutting short the life of a woman he was sworn to protect. Could it ever be taken seriously as a deterrent again after such a monumental failure?