Absurd

The victims of crime (or their family) have the right to give statements about the impact the crime has had upon them to the judge before he or she decides how long the guilty party must serve and rightly so. However, nowhere in the debate on victims’ rights is there any mention of the effects of the rights of victims of miscarriages of justice who have been vindicated, even though there should be no doubt that they have been victimised too.

Despite vindication – a miscarriage of justice that has been resolved by the conviction of the truly guilty – real perpetrators have been treated more leniently than the entirely innocent ones they allowed to be wrongly accused or convicted. That is shameful, especially as it was entirely preventable.

Horrific

The power to set tariffs (the minimum time that must be served of a life sentence) was taken away from the Home Secretary before the first case of vindication in a murder case in the DNA age in Britain, which occurred in July 2003 when Jeffrey Gafoor pleaded guilty to the murder of Lynette White. She was the victim of what was then (Valentine’s Day 1988) the most brutal murder of its type in Welsh history.

Her murder involved over fifty stab wounds, some of which were inflicted as she was dying or after death. Yusef Abdullahi, Steve Miller, Tony Paris and the cousins John and Ronnie Actie were charged with her murder and the Actie cousins were acquitted in November 1990, while the Cardiff Three were jailed for life. The wrongful convictions were quashed two years later, but not before the Cardiff Five had served a total of sixteen years actual prison time for a crime that they did not commit.

Unconscionable

Within a year of the publication of my book Fitted In: The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry in 1998, the case was re-opened and a combination of excellent police work and investigations by forensic scientists resulted in the arrest and conviction of Gafoor. He gave no comment interviews before admitting his guilt at his first appearance for pleas.

However the case against him was compelling as there was no answer to the DNA evidence, which could not have been planted for reasons that have been explained in The Cardiff Five: Innocent Beyond Any Doubt¹. Nevertheless, the law orders judges to credit defendants for ‘swift’ guilty pleas when setting tariffs. But did that apply in this case?

It was an horrific crime and Gafoor had allowed men he knew to be innocent to serve several years of actual imprisonment for his crime, but it was not entirely Mr Justice Royce’s fault that the tariff seemed unduly lenient. However, it remains obscene that there is a real possibility that the truly guilty Gafoor could serve less time in prison for a crime that he committed than the innocent men that he allowed to suffer wrongful imprisonment for the same crime. There can be no excuse for that.

Remorseless

Gafoor can show ‘genuine’ remorse for his crime, because he has reason to be sorry for murdering White, but the Cardiff Three could not without lying about their guilt – a lie that would have prevented her murder from ever being correctly resolved. Given the nature of the crime that they were convicted of they would have been deemed to be ‘in denial of murder’ if they failed to admit their guilt as well.

They would also have been required to take courses to address their offending behaviour, even though they were actually innocent. Gafoor can easily do all of this and progress through the system because he is guilty. Ironically, the system caters for the needs of the guilty and rewards them, but punishes the innocent.

The Cardiff Three could have been crushed by their experience of wrongful imprisonment, or worse still committed suicide in prison, while Gafoor savoured his ill-deserved freedom – none of which was taken into account when setting the tariff.

The criminal justice system claims to put victims at its centre of the system, so why have the Cardiff Five been denied the status they deserve as victims of Gafoor, the criminal justice system and perjury too?

Vindicated

The Cardiff Five (Yusef Abdullahi, John Actie, Ronnie Actie, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris) had been vindicated – proved innocent by the conviction of the real killer. Bizarrely, the CPS and Nicholas Dean QC failed to appreciate the lessons of previous prosecutions of police officers over miscarriages of justice.

In the 1990s – a golden decade of miscarriage of justice awareness – a worrying trend emerged. Convictions fell like flies, or seemingly so. Among them were some of Britainʼs most notorious miscarriages of justice. Beginning with the quashing of the convictions of the Guildford Four (Patrick Armstrong, Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson) in October 1989 others soon followed. A whole squad – the notorious West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad – was disbanded and numerous convictions were quashed. But despite this there were no successful prosecutions of police officers over those cases.

Watching the Detectives

Former police officer Ged Corley was convicted of being the mastermind of a series of armed robberies. His convictions, based on the word armed robbers turned super-grasses, were quashed in 1990. The Police Complaints Authority (PCA), discredited predecessor of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), investigated a bizarre complaint where the de facto head of the inquiry that convicted Corley, Peter Jackson complained about his own investigation.

Alban Turnerʼs conviction for the murder of Notting Hill Carnival coke-can seller Michael Galvin was quashed in March 1990 as well. His conviction depended on Kevin Sarbutts, whose allegations against the police resulted in a perjury conviction. His allegations against Turner were not investigated. They were to all intents and purposes ignored despite serious discrepancies. That would prove to be far from unusual.

A Gross Pattern of Incompetence

The convictions of the late Paul Darvell and his brother Wayne for the murder of Swansea sex-shop manageress Sandra Phillips were quashed in 1992 in strong terms by three judges headed by the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord (Peter) Taylor. Three officers were acquitted in 1994 despite proof that the original jury had been lied to. Allegedly contemporaneous notes had been written on notebooks issued two months later.

And 1991 saw the collapse of the case against the Tottenham Three (Mark Braithwaite, Engin Raghip and Winston Silcott). That resulted in police being prosecuted, but the previous errors were repeated. Jurors have to believe the original defendants were innocent or they wonʼt convict, especially if the prosecutions are lacklustre, which these were.

Egregious Injustices

These were far from the only miscarriages of justice to plague British justice at that time, but they had something in common – trials of police officers followed, as did acquittals in every case that was contested. Some like the Birmingham Six and Stefan Kiszko were as egregious injustices as could occur, yet despite charges being brought, the accused did not even face trial.

There was a lesson in these prosecutions, or rather there was for those willing to see. In all of the cases that reached trial, the accused police officers employed a simple and reprehensible strategy – a sadly effective one. They turned their trials into retrials of the wrongly convicted. Time after time the CPS failed to grasp the obvious lesson of these cases. Juries would not convict police officers over the miscarriage of justice cases without being convinced that the original defendants had been innocent.

Vindication

The trial of Mouncher et al offered new possibilities. Here was a case where there was no credible doubt about the innocence of the original defendants. They had been proved innocent. Jeffrey Gafoor had pleaded guilty and he was guilty. But the CPS did not have to rely on Gafoor – a man who had knowingly allowed innocent men to suffer wrongful imprisonment for his crime and who had benefited from his assistance to the Lynette White Inquiry Phase III investigation in the form of a reduction in the tariff he received.

An integrated approach to the crime-scene evidence, forensic pathology, blood distribution pattern and later DNA would prove consistent with only one interpretation. Lynette Whiteʼs horrific murder had not been witnessed by two or even four people forced to participate in it. There had not been five killers or even three. The evidence demonstrated unequivocally that there was only one killer – a man and his name is Jeffrey Gafoor. It proved that the Cardiff Five were, as they had always insisted, innocent. It had been proved beyond doubt.

Lessons

If the CPS and counsel it instructed had learned the lesson of all the previous failed prosecutions of police officers in the miscarriage of justice cases, they would have realised that their first and most important task was to convince the jury that there was no credible doubt that the Cardiff Five were innocent and that the evidence had established this fact many moons ago. Then and only then would a jury care.

They had this evidence available to them from a very credible witness that there was no doubt about their innocence, but the jury were denied his evidence. If the CPS and its counsel had done their jobs to the standard the public had a right to expect, the ground would have been cut from beneath the feet of the reprehensible tactic of accusing men who had been proved innocent before it was given the opportunity to sully justice further.

Sadly the CPS trod the discredited path yet again and wasted public resources botching yet another prosecution of police officers in circumstances where it was harder to lose than win, but they managed to snatch a pathetic defeat from the jaws of victory.

Stalling Justice

The Police Corruption Trial of the Century had ended in the shambolic farce that some – not me – were always convinced it would be. Now for the first time I can say exactly what I think of the deeply flawed process.

Graham Mouncher, and seven former colleagues in South Wales Police, Michael Daniels, Peter Greenwood, Paul Jennings, Thomas Page, Richard Powell, John Seaford and Paul Stephen were acquitted on the orders of the judge, Mr Justice Sweeney last week. Ian Massey and Violet Perriam were also acquitted.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) threw the towel in without asking for time to try to locate the missing files. Yesterday the charges against the remaining defendants John Gillard, Stephen Hicks, John Murray and Wayne Pugh were dropped – Rachel OʼBrien had already been found unfit to stand trial for health reasons.

Explanation

Page demanded an inquiry into why he and his colleagues were subjected to the inquiry. That was obvious. An investigation carried out by South Wales Police under the auspices of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) had gathered evidence that serious crimes – conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury had been committed during the original Lynette White Inquiry (Phase I).

That evidence had been presented to the CPS which decided whether there was sufficient evidence to justify prosecutions. It concluded that those charged, including Page, had a case to answer. Consequently, they were committed for trial.¹ It was exactly the same process that anyone suspected of a serious criminal offence has to go through.

Unlike the Cardiff Five who were demonstrably innocent – they had been vindicated by the conviction of the real killer and the scientific evidence – Page and his co-defendants had retained their liberty while facing and standing trial.

They ran a sadly predictable defence – a despicable one, but one that had borne fruit previously. They blamed the victims of the proven miscarriage of justice (see Conspiracy of Malice – Predictable). But before the lives of the Cardiff Five could be trashed for nothing error after error had to occur.

Inadequate

Represented by a battery of lawyers at public expense the games began. It soon became clear that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was not up to the task if it ever has been. Despite knowing in advance that lawyers for the eight police officers scheduled to face trial first planned to use disclosure obligation to try to force the collapse of the trial before a single word had been given in evidence, the CPS failed to appoint a Disclosure Officer to ensure that the Phase III officers understood exactly what was required of them.

The CPS chose to sell out the interests of justice in the hope of cutting costs and corners. This wretched penny-pinching would have dire consequences later as Graham Mouncher and his colleagues would shamefully evade judgement by a jury of their peers. The responsibility for that rests squarely on the shoulders of the CPS. The Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney General failed miserably to ensure that the bare minimum of standards were observed in this case.

It ought to have been impossible to botch this case. It was or should have been a slam dunk. The real killer had admitted his guilt. Jeffrey Gafoor had made it clear that he had acted on his own and that the original defendants the Cardiff Five (Yusef Abdullahi, John and Ronnie Actie, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris) had nothing to do with the murder of 20 year-old Lynette White.

Gafoor had allegedly told a different story to his QC John Charles Rees. This ʻlegally privilegedʼ information was disclosed by a third party considering Reesʼ fees for representing Gafoor. But it should not have mattered a whit. Indisputable crime-scene evidence and forensic science proved beyond credible doubt that the Cardiff Five were completely innocent of the murder of Lynette White, that one person had killed her on his own and that this had been known before the Cardiff Five were tried.

The CPS and Dean failed miserably to present expert evidence of this despite having it available to them. This was and remains a wretched and miserably botched prosecution. Whether it was deliberately botched remains to be seen.