Anniversary

Thirteen years ago today Jeffrey Gafoor made history. Gafoor pleaded guilty to the murder of Lynette White. She was the victim of what was then (February 14th 1988) the most brutal murder of its type in Welsh history. Faced with overwhelming evidence Gafoor admitted that he had murdered Lynette. He had provided samples for DNA testing before attempting to take his own life in February 2003. Police officers from the Lynette White Inquiry Phase II saved his life.

Phase II was one of the best investigations ever. Led by Detective Chief Superintendent Kevin O’Neill, these officers and the forensic scientists, did a fantastic job. They knew that finding the real killer would come at a huge price to the force. No British police force had ever resolved a miscarriage of justice by convicting the real killer in the DNA age. Any force that did so knew that it would unleash a can of worms, the like of which British policing had never faced before. But still, they investigated doggedly and continued until they made history by bringing Gafoor to justice.

A Colossal Error

And then that storm was unleashed. Phase III investigated what went wrong – who was responsible for one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice ever. Thirty-four people were arrested and interviewed under caution on suspicion of offences including conspiring to pervert the course of justice and perjury. Twenty of them were police officers and 13 were told that they would face trial, along with two civilian witnesses.

But before they faced trial three of the alleged eye-witnesses were tried for perjury and conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Mr Justice (Sir David) Maddison ruled that they could not claim duress, as the law demanded that they must retract immediately, but to whom – police officers, the courts? Who? How could they be expected the courts or police after what they had gone through?

Mark Grommek, Angela Psaila and Learnne Vilday (the New Cardiff Three) were convicted – rightly as the law said, but wrongly according to justice and conscience. The court accepted that they had told the lies they were forced to tell and then they were prosecuted for telling them. They were each sentenced to 18 months in prison. This was and remains a huge injustice – the law could not have acted more inappropriately, but worse would soon follow.

Travesty

With 13 police officers and two witnesses due to face trial it was decided that eight former officers, including Graham Mouncher and Richard Powell and the witnesses Ian Massey and Violet Perriam would face trial first. The trial began in 2011. I was due to be a witness against Massey. Nicholas Dean QC and his prosecution team ensured that I would miss virtually all the trial for no good reason – actually there was a very good reason.

We were not meant to see what was unfolding. It would take a very long time to unravel, but unravel it would. The trial collapsed on largely spurious grounds. Disclosure was not what it should have been – that is unarguable, but whose fault is that? The straw that broke the camel’s back was the failure to disclose some documents – copies actually. The originals had been retained, and copies were taken.

The copies were meaningless. It was believed that they had been destroyed – evidence to that effect was given, but it was not true. A month after the sensational collapse of the trial the supposedly destroyed documents were discovered in the very boxes that they had been sent to police by the IPCC.

Unlawful

I had been kept out of the trial until it was far too late – we believe that was their intention all along. South Wales Police chose to cooperate with HMCPSI and the IPCC, both of whom were investigating aspects of the collapse of the trial. The terms of reference established that neither process was worth cooperating with as they would not establish why a notorious miscarriage of justice had been allowed to occur.

I chose not to cooperate and demanded the return of my work product, which was mine alone, as was the copyright on it. The Professional Standards Department unlawfully seized my work and distributed to others against my wishes in flagrant disregard of my rights and copyright.

The justification supplied a year late did not apply to me. Naturally the IPCC – itself an interested party and therefore not an impartial arbiter upheld the ludicrous justification – one that applied to criminal suspects not cooperating witnesses. Both HMCPSI and the IPCC failed miserably to explain why this appalling miscarriage of justice had occurred – inevitable really – as neither was concerned with that and nor was the Home Secretary, Theresa May. Her concern was to avoid a public inquiry.

Squaring the Circle

As early as the first week of the 2011 Police Corruption Trial it became obvious that the prosecution was lacklustre – notwithstanding that the prosecution team could talk a good talk. The defence case was a tried and tested method in such cases – deny that there had ever been a miscarriage of justice. The Cardiff Five were guilty, they claimed. But what about the DNA? What about Gafoor’s guilty plea? What about his insistence that he had acted alone?

Simple. None of that mattered. All that counted were his inconsistent accounts. He could only remember inflicting ten or twelve stab wounds and not the throat ones. So what? Well that meant it was possible that there was more than one attack. “Technically”, Angela Gallup said – the scientific equivalent of ‘and I can’t rule out the possibility that pigs could fly either!’

There was forensic pathology evidence and blood distribution pattern evidence that had an important story to tell. Lynette’s murder was never consistent with five killers and two witnesses charging around the crime-scene in darkness without leaving any trace of themselves or interfering with any of the evidence in the flat.

It simply flew in the face of any notion of logic.

The Final Insults

It served well in 2011 – so well that it was trotted out again in the compensation case in 2015. And as in 2015 the witnesses that could demolish this outrageous hypothesis were never called. We will be publishing Trials and Tribulations – Innocence Matters? soon. The aim is to reassert the truth – the Cardiff Five are, as they always were, totally innocent of any involvement in the murder of Lynette White, even though it is too late to matter to Yusef Abdullahi and Ronnie Actie.

Meanwhile, Gafoor had received a very lenient tariff in 2005 – just 12 years and 8 months, 13 years in reality once remand was taken into account. Consequently, Gafoor is now eligible to apply for release on parole. We will be publishing Bad Form – How Tariffs Protect the Guilty and Punish the Innocent soon to illustrate the grave flaws with the tariff system – one that sees no problem with treating the truly guilty more leniently than the innocent for the same crime. As Lloyd Paris – Tony’s brother – said, “Things are back to front!”

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (June 1st 2011)

Lectures

If we intend to keep handing out lectures on human rights to other governments, then we have to address our own failings. There are seven vindication cases in Britain in the DNA age. Two of them occurred in London, one in Hampshire, another in West Yorkshire, one near the border between Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire and the other two were in Wales.

For legal reasons the Welsh ones could not be detailed[2] – there were trials in progress in both cases. John Pope had won an appeal, which led to a retrial in Newport before Mr Justice Roderick Evans. I covered that trial. The other trial was the Lynette White Inquiry Police Corruption Trial.

Both Phillip Skipper and the Cardiff Five had been vindicated, but were still facing unwarranted accusations. Nevertheless, the effects still need to be addressed in all vindication cases.

Shameful

Stefan Kiszko is dead and so is his remarkable mother, Charlotte. Both went to their graves without receiving assistance to rebuild their lives or even compensation. By todayʼs provisions, Kiszko was entitled to both, but he was long dead.

He lost over sixteen years of his life for a crime he did not commit and it was patently obvious early in the Lesley Molseed Inquiry that Kiszko was innocent. He could not produce semen, but that was on her clothing and was therefore an early and important clue.

The late Jack Dibb was charged over the Kiszko case as was his then subordinate Dick Holland and a forensic scientist Ronald Outteridge. The charges were dropped by a magistrate after Dibbʼs death. Years later a hit on the National DNA Database resulted in the identification of Ronald Castree as the prime suspect.

Thirty-two years after Molseed was murdered Castree was convicted. He still protests his innocence, but the real victim of the miscarriage of justice is Kiszko. He was wrongly labelled a pervert for exposing himself to school-girls. It later emerged that this was the justification for suspecting him in the first place, but that accusation was false too.

Years later, with Kiszkoʼs life ruined, the girls admitted that they had lied about him for a laugh! This illustrates the dangers of relying on the uncorroborated claims of immature people. The wheels of justice began turning at break-neck speed as a result of that and the subsequent obsession with Kiszko.

Appalling

Kiszko was failed disgracefully by the criminal justice system. His defence layers knew about the semen issue, but failed to present evidence at his trial that would have cleared him beyond doubt. The consequences were dreadful. He was attacked in prison and damaged irreparably by his ordeal. He never recovered and never saw Castree brought to justice.

While his defence lawyers at trial must take the lionʼs share of the blame and deservedly too, the rest of the criminal justice is not blameless either. The evidence against Kiszko was hopeless.

He was a vulnerable man coerced by inadequate interviewing methods into confessing to a crime he did not commit. Progress has been made in this respect. Confessions, especially from such vulnerable people, are not treated as the Holy Grail they once were.

Such advances are signs of an integrated approach to evidence having been developed, but too late for Kiszko. If the scientific evidence had been handled in a competent manner, the truth could have emerged in time to prevent that tragedy occurring.

Sadly it is too late to do anything for Kiszko or his mother, but his experiences must be recalled with disgust and a determination to learn from them. Nothing resembling this must ever be allowed to happen again.

Investigative methods must be fully integrated with advances in science and also current forensic science techniques. Rules of evidence must be adapted too. For evidence of innocence to be available early in this process, yet take sixteen years to emerge, while an innocent manʼs life was destroyed, is utterly unacceptable.

Post-Conviction Relief

Sean Hodgson, at least is still alive and eligible for both compensation and the inadequate after-care provided by the government through the Miscarriages of Justice Support Service (MJSS),[3] a misnomer if ever there was one. Hodgson served nearly three decades in prison for the rape and murder of Teresa di Simone. David Lace was the real perpetrator. His post-conviction confession was found to be unreliable, yet discrepancies in Hodgsonʼs account and the lack of scientific evidence were discounted. His new lawyers were told that samples to test no longer existed, but eventually testable material was located and Hodgson was cleared. Vindication followed soon, as Laceʼs confession was tested against scientific evidence. His guilt was proved, but Lace was long dead. Hodgson qualifies for assistance from the MJSS and is eligible for compensation too. Of seven vindication cases in Britain, Hodgson alone is eligible for both and alive to claim it.

Britainʼs Supreme Court recently produced a definition of a miscarriage of justice with reference to a compensation claim by Andrew Adams, but regardless of it, many victims of miscarriages of justice including the vindicated remain excluded from eligibility for compensation and after-care too.[4] There is no doubt that Colin Stagg is and always was completely innocent of any involvement in the murder of Rachel Nickell. It is hard to find a more blinkered investigation than that one. The honey-trap was more in keeping with Cold War intrigue than legitimate investigation of crime, yet it was attempted. It was quite rightly thrown out by Mr Justice (Sir Harry) Ognall in 1994 after Stagg had been in prison on remand for the best part of a year.

Stagg emerged to a vitriolic whispering campaign, fuelled among others by disgruntled police officers who felt aggrieved that the evidence they had gathered was not accepted. The honey-trap officer, referred to as Lizzie James, was compensated before Stagg after it affected her career – she left the police and country too over it. There never was any credible evidence against Stagg; it had to be generated through those unethical methods. It also helped to end the career of Paul Britton; he deserved nothing less. Despite his efforts to distance himself from the scandal, he is not a victim in this and nor are the officers who allowed that honey-trap to proceed and nor is the CPS either.

An integrated approach to crime investigation could have prevented the whole fiasco from happening. Stagg was not a likely killer. There was nothing in his criminal record or character traits that justified suspecting him at all and there was no scientific evidence against him either. Meanwhile, the real killer, Robert Napper, should have emerged as a suspect far earlier and at least two lives could have been saved if a rape allegation had been investigated competently. DNA testing eventually resolved the case beyond doubt by conclusively linking Napper to Nickellʼs murder, but this was a catalogue of errors in both investigations and that continued after resolution too.

Stagg has been paid substantial compensation and rightly so, but were the same thing to happen now, he would not be eligible. That is shameful, but it is in some ways worse that he does not qualify for assistance to rebuild his life. Any definition of a miscarriage of justice that does not include Colin Stagg, is an affront to common sense and justice too and any scheme to assist victims of miscarriages of justice to recover from their ordeal that does not help him is a disgrace. But it does not stop there.

In 2006 four young men should have received an apology from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. A crass error by forensic scientist Sian Hedges was discovered during a review of the Damilola Taylor Inquiry. Original suspects Ricky and Danny Preddie had been eliminated due in part to the absence of blood evidence on their property. It later emerged that a training shoe belonging to Danny had clear traces of blood on it – the photograph proved it.[5] The blood was DNA tested and found to have been shed by Taylor. Fibre evidence also linked them to the 10 year-oldʼs death. The Preddie brothers changed their account of their movements as a result, but were convicted of manslaughter in August 2006.

Four years earlier four boys were acquitted by judge or jury. The case against them was a travesty. A witness referred to in court as Bromley was utterly unreliable to put it mildly, but there were other signs that something was badly wrong as well. A trawl of Feltham Young Offenders Institute produced so called evidence, some of which came from witnesses of the lowest possible order. Instead of helping those boys to rebuild their lives – one of them has been deported as a crime risk – they have been left to fend for themselves and are denied even an expression of regret, let alone apology. The effect the wrongful accusation of murdering Damilola has had on his life and subsequent conduct has not been considered on that decision or on the future. He is an adult now, living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that is far from stable and to which he has little or no connection to any more, as he left it aged nine.

[1] An indication of the importance of an integrated approach can be seen in Equality of Arms, at http://fittedin.org/fittedin/?p=690  for more on this case and others too.

[2] This article was part of a presentation made at a conference to medical practitioners, which included forensic    pathologists, in 2011. At the time two trials were taking place – the Lynette White Police Inquiry Police Corruption Trial and the retrial of John Pope for the murder of Karen Skipper. Both of these re vindication cases and ones that FIP has taken an interest in. Pope was subsequently convicted. The Police Corruption Trial was halted on the orders of the judge, following serious failures by the prosecution. This is ironic as the CPS imposed conditions on others, especially myself and Fitted-In while displaying extremely shoddy standards itself, which should have led to serious consequences for it. This is one of the reasons we still demand a Truth and Justice Commission into the whole of this case, rather than the deeply flawed processes that have occurred so far.

[3] Hodgson died in October 2012, aged 61.

[4] The sadly defunct Fitted-In Journal covered this issue in A Deafening Silence. Regrettably other media, including the Guardian and New Statesman, insist on ignoring this scandal, while claiming that it is the type of story that is important to them. We will republish it soon.

[5] See The Partial Truth Truth – Errors of Judgement at http://fittedin.org/fittedin/?p=743 for our coverage of this issue.

1 Mr Michael is now the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Wales. The position replaced Police Authorities with the exception of London, which transferred Police Authority powers to the Mayor of London.

]]> https://fittedin.org/fittedin/?feed=rss2&p=1032 0 https://fittedin.org/fittedin/?p=1022 https://fittedin.org/fittedin/?p=1022#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2015 13:37:35 +0000 http://fittedin.org/fittedin/?p=1022 Read more]]> By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (April 23^rd 2011)

Unconscionable

The Dutch criminal justice has a good reputation abroad. Even activists, when told about the now notorious Lynette White Inquiry as the battle to free the Cardiff Three was nearing its conclusion in 1992, defended it. They said that it was impossible for justice to miscarry in the Netherlands as badly as it had in the Lynette White Inquiry for example.

Their outrage was limited to a peace activist who had been sentenced to two weeks imprisonment for daubing graffiti in an American base after breaking into it. They insisted that this was sentencing him twice for the same crime and they were outraged about it.

This, they insisted, was the worst miscarriage of justice in the Netherlands at that time. But they were wrong. The Dutch system was capable of miscarrying as badly as it had in Britain – worse even.

Vicious

On June 22^nd 2000 ten-year-old Nienke Kleiss was raped and murdered in Beatrix Park in the small town of Schiedam, which is within easy commuting distance of Rotterdam. She fought hard for her life and left vital clues to identify the perpetrator, but her efforts were wasted by police and the Dutch criminal justice system for four years as justice miscarried twice.

Her eleven-year-old friend, Maikel Willebrand, with whom she had been playing, was also viciously stabbed at the same time by Wik Haalmeijer. Willebrand survived by playing dead only to be absurdly accused of having inflicted the injuries on himself to cover up his crime – the attack on Kleiss. It was an utterly ludicrous allegation and an unconscionable way to treat a child who had been the victim of a vicious attack.

DNA testing would play a large part in this inquiry. It quickly proved that Willebrand had been telling the truth that he had been attacked himself and had played no part in the rape or murder of Kleiss, but police were still not prepared to listen to him at all.

They only moved on from Willebrand when they heard about a coincidence regarding the man who then became their new prime suspect Kees Borsboom – the man who had helped Willebrand after the crimes by reporting it to the police. And even then they would not accept Willebrand’s account because the boy would not turn on the man who had helped him.

Fanciful

DNA expert Richard Eikelenboom, then working for the Netherlands Forensic Institute (FSI) developed the DNA protocols that were used in the Schiedammer Park case. He knew that Low Template DNA had produced important results, quickly realising that both Willebrand and Borsboom had nothing to do with the crimes, but he was not the Reporting Officer and Ate Kloosterman’s report was very selective.

Kloosterman told the judge that the ‘foreign’ DNA results on Kleiss’ shoe and fingernails had been deposited by a child at her school. Unknown to the court there were compelling reasons to reject that explanation. Kleiss had been playing in water just before she was attacked and the surviving victim had told police that she had scratched her assailant – time would tell that she had.

The results on the shoe and elsewhere were also the same – it would have required an incredible coincidence for all of those alleles to have been deposited at various locations innocently, but Kloosterman knew the significance of the results well or should have done. It was obvious that they had been deposited by one person and not by Kleiss’ classmates. They had the DNA of the real perpetrator – enough to eliminate the entirely innocent Borsboom, but selective disclosure prevented that from happening.

Coded

For the last quarter of a century the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was supposed to have provided independent scrutiny on decisions over whether or not to prosecute. It had powers to discontinue prosecutions, which it has used, and it had guidelines that ought to have ensured that the Cardiff Five at least never stood trial.

Hywel Hughes was the Crown Prosecutor in this case. He took the decision to prosecute and did so in spite of the Code for Crown Prosecutors that provided guidance on whether the evidence was of sufficient quality to prosecute with a realistic prospect of conviction. Outrageously the CPS has tried to defend its decision to prosecute by pointing out that it secured convictions.

Culpable

Hughes was also responsible for deciding to prosecute the Newsagent’s Three (Michael O’Brien, Ellis Sherwood and Darren Hall) – another high profile Welsh miscarriage of justice¹ – despite over 100 breaches of PACE and other serious failings. Examination of that Code in the Lynette White Inquiry leaves no room for doubt that it was a prosecution that should never have been tolerated.

Securing convictions in a case now acknowledged, and actually obvious even at that time, to be a notorious miscarriage of justice must never be seen as a justification for a prosecution that plainly did not have credible evidence to justify proceedings. The CPS had a responsibility to halt this prosecution in its tracks and an ongoing discretion to stop the prosecution at any stage before wrongful convictions were secured amid a trail of devastated lives.

Pathetic

Instead, it failed to do so in a case where there is no credible doubt about innocence and acquiesced meekly when those charged with causing that miscarriage of justice stood trial and were allowed to claim that the Cardiff Five were in fact guilty when the evidence proved that they were not. The CPS failed to present the clearest possible evidence of their innocence adequately, despite having had this proof from a very credible source – a respected forensic scientist. That is shameful. The irony of this should not be lost.

Allowing the Cardiff Five to stand trial on evidence that would have been rejected as implausible had it been offered as a script to any policing drama is a failing that taints its claims of independence even now almost a quarter of a century later. It had the opportunity to consign the discredited Penderyn methods to history and failed to do so miserably.

Shameful

Its refusal to do its job adequately resulted in other miscarriages of justice that could have been prevented. The CPS must bear the ultimate responsibility for that. Had it refused to prosecute the Cardiff Five the police would have had a clear message – the Penderyn methods (see The Blame Game at http://fittedin.org/fittedin/?p=918) will no longer result in prosecution, let alone convictions.

That in turn would have meant that police would have been faced with a stark choice. They could cling to the outdated methods and hope for the best (worst really), or they could secretly fabricate evidence, telling nobody and hope to get away with it.

Alternatively, they could change their methods, relying on modern investigative techniques and advances in forensic science, resulting in more reliable evidence and a better chance of securing convictions that deservedly stick. Hughes’ failings and those of the CPS robbed society of an efficient and just criminal justice system almost 25 years ago. For that it must receive a large slice of the blame, but there are others deserving of condemnation too.

The Suspension of Disbelief

There is no longer any credible doubt that the Cardiff Five¹ are innocent, but they always were. It should not have required the conviction of the real murderer of Lynette White to convince anyone. Any objective review of the evidence should have led inexorably to that conclusion. As with other miscarriage of justice cases the evidence and common sense ought to have prevented not only wrongful convictions, but the wrongful arrests too.

The murder of Lynette White is a tawdry tale of a vicious killing that involved excessive brutality – far beyond what was needed to kill – and the investigation and trials that followed of justice betrayed. It is now established as one of the most notorious and easily preventable miscarriages of justice in British history.

An extraordinary tale began in the early hours of Valentine’s Day 1988 with what was then the most brutal murder of its type in Welsh history – over 50 stab wounds – with obvious sexual overtones to it. After ten months the original inquiry revealed a closed mind that focused on obviously innocent men.

Forensic science proved the police’s scenario that five men and at least two alleged eyewitnesses were in that room along with the victim was quite frankly ludicrous. This became an egregious miscarriage of justice, but it ought to have been impossible. The quality of the evidence gathered against the five men who eventually stood trial was woeful to put it mildly.

It was a case that required an extraordinary suspension of disbelief from several professionals, especially lawyers who should have known better, but there is nothing in that story that does not occur routinely in other cases. It is the combination of what has gone wrong that is incredible. Equally unbelievable is the failure of the criminal justice system to halt a plainly inappropriate prosecution in its tracks and hold those who failed the public accountable.

Bullied and Hectored

It is well known that Stephen Miller was ‘bullied and hectored’ by police in interviews that breached his rights shamefully. Miller was shouted down until he accepted the police’s version of Lynette’s murder – a scientifically ludicrous scenario that produced an utterly false confession.

Miller was an extremely vulnerable person. He was highly suggestible and of below average intelligence. He was very susceptible to bullying and held to an absurd standard by David Elfer QC – a standard that required accepting everything put to him to meet Elfer’s definition of suggestibility.

Dr Gisli Gudjonsson, the acknowledged leader in his field, understood the extent of Miller’s vulnerability to making a false confession. Sadly Elfer did not and, even more worryingly, nor did Miller’s defence lawyers for his trial and retrial. Their failures contributed in no small measure to an awful miscarriage of justice.

Unjustifiable

The Crown Prosecution Service was established over a quarter of a century ago. Among its high profile and spectacular failures is the Lynette White Inquiry. Its Code for Crown Prosecutors included criteria on sufficiency of evidence. When the Cardiff Five were prosecuted it had 13 – the overwhelming majority of them strongly suggested that it was a case that should never have been brought to trial.

The CPS has been avoiding taking responsibility for its numerous failures in this case for several years now. They even had the effrontery to claim that securing convictions justified the decision to prosecute. Since when has securing one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in British history been a justification?

Excuses

When that was pointed out to it, they hid behind the recent proceedings against the former police officers, claiming that they could not answer the questions then. But they promised answers after the trial. The collapse of the trial was followed by pledges to respond that were quickly broken. The new excuse was that they would respond after HMCPSI reported, even though the concerns we raised were not part of that investigation and they knew that full well.

“The role of Her Majestyʼs Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (HMCPSI) is to enhance the quality of justice through independent inspection and assessment of prosecution services and, in doing so, improve their effectiveness and efficiency”, Baron (James) Wallace of Tankerness responded in writing to Baron (John) Laird.

“Although HMCPSI examines a range of cases as part of its normal inspection process, it does not investigate and report on individual cases unless, exceptionally, a case is referred to HMCPSI by the Attorney-General using statutory powers for matters intended for cases of general public concern” Lord Wallace continued.

Inadequate

This plainly was a case of great public concern, but so were many others. There are now six vindication cases in England and Wales¹. Many of them raise issues over the original prosecutions. The CPS has yet to be held accountable over any of them. HMCPSI has not been asked to investigate those or others too where prosecutorial misconduct or incompetence may have occurred.

“However, as a rule HMCPSI is not an investigative body”, Wallace continued. “HMCPSI has undertaken two recent reviews at the request of the Law Officers”. The HMCPSI report allowed the CPS to evade responsibility for its numerous failures over this case. The CPS has never explained its dismal performance in the Lynette White Inquiry. It should not be allowed to evade its responsibility to the public.

Michael Mansfield QC

The Fitted-In Project welcomes the publication of Satish Sekar’s new book The Cardiff Five: Innocent Beyond Any Doubt, which follows on from his first book Fitted In: the Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry. Sekar’s analysis provides an exhaustive account of a vexed and unique case. His long awaited second book explains why this case rather than any other made history several times.

Bob Woffinden (Author and journalist)

It has taken 14 years for Sekar to produce another book. The Cardiff Five: Innocent Beyond Any Doubt published by Waterside Press has proved worth the wait and sadly necessary. Even now, with their innocence proven, an unjustified whispering campaign continues. This book demonstrates the innocence of the five accused men clearly.

Alun Michael JP, MP

Sekar’s book shows how history was made several times. It details the concept of vindication – a concept developed by Sekar – arguing that it is the motor of change in the criminal justice system that resulted not only in the conviction of the real killer, Jeffrey Gafoor, but  a unique, but ultimately flawed investigation into what went wrong. Sekar points out that this obscured successes and prevented it from achieving its full potential.

Mags Gavan (BAFTA award-winning film-maker)