The prosecution team in the Lynette White murder trial included two Queens Counsels, led by David Elfer. The other became Mr Justice Roderick Evans. Elfer failed to understand Stephen Miller’s vulnerability and used a confession that was false, ludicrous and unlawfully obtained. He relied on obviously unreliable witnesses and presented a case to the jury that should never have come to trial.

Both he and the CPS must have known that the statements of one of Yusef Abdullahiʼs alibi witnesses supported his claims that he had been working on a ship in Barry Docks on the night of the murder. Despite that knowledge they not only bluffed the defence into not calling vital alibi witness Brynley Samuel, but gave the jury the false impression that Samuel didnʼt help Abdullahi.

Judicial Responsibilities

The trial judges bear responsibility too. The late Sir David McNeill plainly had a standard on oppression that Lord Taylor strongly disagreed with – one that was open to shocking abuse. It set a standard that would have allowed police to find the weakest person and bully them into accepting what they wanted to hear. Even now some believe that there was nothing wrong with the way that Miler was questioned.

Taylor, sitting with a then Mr Justice (Sir John) Laws and Mr Justice (Sir Oliver) Popplewell, were ‘horrified’ by the methods that McNeill found admissible, but they too failed to resolve a vital issue. McNeill was wrong in law and that fact should have been acknowledged by the appeal judges. Had McNeill ruled on the confession as he should have done, the miscarriage of justice would probably not have occurred and the terrible error of not arguing that Miller had been bullied would likely not have happened in the second trial.

Severance

Even the next trial judge Mr Justice (Sir John) Leonard cannot escape censure. A few well-chosen words from judge to jury that Leonard thought would dispel the prejudice from refusing to sever Miller’s trial from that of his co-defendants who did not confess – a recurring theme in miscarriage of justice cases – were ignored by the jury. The same thing had happened in another South Wales case where Leonard was the trial judge less than five years earlier.

That too was later recognised as an awful miscarriage of justice – the Darvell brothers (Paul and Wayne). The murder of Sandra Phillips remains unsolved. Leonard should have been criticised by the Court of Appeal judges for his failure to sever these trials – in practice the only way to ensure that the trials of defendants who did not confess were not prejudiced by the admissions of those who did.

It must now be clear – it should have been at the time – that juries rely on confessions. They cannot believe that people confess to crimes they did not commit, especially for such a meagre reward as an end to the interrogations when that means sacrificing their long term interests and freedom, possibly for a very long time, but they do.

A Wretched History

The history of false confessions contributing to wrongful convictions is a long and wretched one that has continued to occur despite PACE. Understanding of the causes of these confessions and extent of vulnerabilities has undoubtedly improved, but defence lawyers cannot be immune from this process.

Millerʼs original lawyers had no idea or understanding of the extent of his vulnerabilities and need for robust support. The result was an egregious and entirely preventable miscarriage of justice, not just against Miller, but his co-accused too.

Inadmissible

The jury should have been protected from relying on inadmissible evidence like that, but it must be obvious that juries tend to believe confessions, however absurd, in these cases, especially without receiving the proper context of why innocent people confess to crimes they did not commit and on occasion implicate other innocent people. They too were not criticised by the appeal judges.

Those judges couldn’t wait to quash the convictions of the Cardiff Three, but in their rush to do so they failed to allow grounds to be developed that years later were at the heart of the recently failed trial of the former police officers and witnesses. Had those grounds been developed in 1992 as they should have been, safeguards that could have helped to prevent other miscarriages of justice would have been established.

Damage Limitation

The Court of Appeal refused to apologise and despite its strengths on the one area it considered in depth, the judgement that freed the Cardiff Three left them vulnerable to an unjustified and unjustifiable whispering campaign. That disgraces the criminal justice system.

It was in fact little more than a damage limitation exercise. However the attempt to force the lid shut on a can of worms, the like of which South Wales had never seen before, ultimately failed. The final reckoning and damage to both the force and criminal justice system proved far worse than if they had grasped the nettle two decades ago. There is a lesson in that.

The Cardiff Five are no more innocent now than they were when wrongly arrested and charged. They should never have gone through the ordeal that the state gave them no option but to endure and nor should Lynetteʼs family or indeed the people of South Wales. It should not have required finding the real killer to prove innocence and facilitate an investigation into what went wrong.

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.