Real Friends

Yusef Abdullahi is the first of the Cardiff Three to die. His recent death has re-opened the debate on the provision of after-care to victims of miscarriages of justice. Abdullahi was just 49 and died without having received any assistance to rebuild his life from the Miscarriages of Justice Support Service (MJSS).

“The state has a duty to restore him to the life that he would have had if the miscarriage of justice had not happened”, said Abdullahi’s QC and champion Roger Backhouse. “He could have gone to university. He was that intelligent. Yusef is the only person that I would do this for”.

Backhouse used his own resources to try to help Abdullahi. Despite his own failing health Backhouse came and saw Abdullahi, arranged medical assistance for him, helped him fill in social security forms and much more besides. He even contributed to an as yet unbroadcast documentary on the subject.

There were others too. Despite being the victim of one of Wales’ most notorious miscarriages of justice and needing help himself Michael O’Brien helped Abdullahi too. “I will never forget that Yusef campaigned for me at a time when few others did”, he said. “I wanted to help him and think it outrageous that he never received help. I took it up with the Miscarriages of Justice Project [MJP] before”. It is now called the Miscarriages of Justice Support Service.

Salvation and Curse

O’Brien welcomed Abdullahi into his home and advised him on some pitfalls and offered help. Winston Silcott rarely gets any credit, but he played a pivotal role in helping Abdullahi both inside and outside of prison. Abdullahi tried to credit him, as Silcott’s assistance gave Abdullahi a purpose to help him cope in prison. Silcott inspired him again when Abdullahi most needed it to get his life back on track outside.

Abdullahi came out of prison in 1992 in a blaze of publicity and embarked on a punishing schedule to highlight the plight of other victims of miscarriages of justice. Within a year he was thoroughly exhausted. It had been both his salvation and curse. Campaigning for others gave him a sense of purpose again and deprived him of time to focus on his problems – they could wait – but the schedule wore him out and down. He needed a break – he’d earned it – but it came at a very high price.

Deprived of the benefit of his cause he sank into the problems that others in his situation had faced before and since. I’d fallen out of touch with him – I had other things on my mind. The outlook for him was bleak and steadily got worse. He turned back to alcohol and drugs and as his demons took over, he slid into depression and an ever downward spiral. So-called friends did little or nothing to help. He was horribly let down, but his story is sadly too common.

Fateful Meeting

It had been the best part of ten years since I’d seen him last. The phone calls and visits had dried up from both of us. He didn’t call me and I didn’t call him. We both had other things going on. The same applied to many others. I still heard about him occasionally if not from him and I didn’t like what I was hearing, but it was his life and he had to be ready to change it, or so I thought then. I was wrong. He needed help desperately, but offering it was not enough.

When I saw him again for the first time in ten years I was shocked. The confident affable young man I’d known and remembered was gone – replaced by a man who looked at least ten years older than he was. He had been worn down by life’s outrages. He turned up to a court hearing in which Jeffrey Gafoor, the man who committed the crime that wrecked Abdullahi’s life, was sent to jail, not having finished his breakfast – a can of Tenants.

I’d seen enough. Something had to be done. Someone had to intervene. If they didn’t he was on borrowed time and not much of it. I approached the MJP and professionals and representatives too, outlining my concern that if he wasn’t helped soon he would not survive long.

We developed a package of after-care just for him. Society had wronged him and others like him. Now it could put it right by helping to rebuild his life. It wasn’t ideal as he had specific care needs, but the MJP was there to help. It had been set up that very year precisely to help victims of miscarriages of justice. Surely it would intervene. It simply had to.

A Shameful Betrayal

Abdullahi had issues requiring medical intervention. He needed help to conquer his addictions, but that required medical permission. All it needed was an approach to his doctor to recommend the course of treatment and help required, but not just for him. There was no point helping him give up hard and addictive drugs if he was going to be sent back into the same circumstances that he found so intolerable that he needed heroin to block out his woes in the first place.

With others using around him it was inevitable that he would relapse – it was when, not if. Miraculously a solution was found. They would all be helped at the same time. All it required was his doctor’s recommendation, but who could get through to him? Why should he trust the so-called friends who hadn’t been there for ten years when he needed it – and yes I’m as responsible as the rest over this.

I approached the MJP. I stressed the urgency of the situation – it was the summer of 2003. They were asked to go and see them and develop a plan to help. Even the limited service that they offered was enough to get things started. They agreed to go to Cardiff to see him and Tony Paris. It should have been the start of the rest of his life. Instead he was let down.

The then Deputy Director of the MJP, Amarjit Kaur, reneged on the agreement to go and see them. She claimed that it would affect their funding and mean that they could not help other victims of miscarriages of justice.

Nearly eight years later Abdullahi is dead and the disgraceful situation that denied him help has not been resolved. The MJSS was set up to provide assistance to victims of miscarriages of justice rebuild their lives, so why was Abdullahi left out when he badly needed help?

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.