By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (June 12th 2016)
The Eleventh Hour
In two days time Mr Justice (Sir Wyn) Williams will deliver his long-awaited judgement at 11. It’s expected to be a long document, detailing a sorry tale of one of Britain’s most notorious miscarriages of justice. It is expected to determine whether the Cardiff Five suffered a miscarriage of justice at all.
It has become a saga that even Eugène Ionseco the master of Absurdist theatre would have struggled to comprehend. White became black – literally – and now history may not only be rewritten, but obliterated. If Williams rules in favour of the former officers suing South Wales Police, it will turn history on its head and deter attempts to investigate alleged police malpractice in miscarriage of justice cases.
The question of why South Wales Police were allowed to investigate themselves and why the institutions and politicians that they are supposedly accountable to permitted it to happen will be shuffled off into an archive, never to be answered. But it will answer some pertinent questions, not least of which is do we have the police and criminal justice system we deserve?
Pertinent Queries
If we tolerate this, the answer is yes. The Lynette White Inquiry began over 28 years ago. It has seen five innocent men wrongly accused of her murder – three were wrongfully convicted. John and Ronnie Actie were acquitted in 1990. Two years later the convictions of the Cardiff Three (Yusef Abdullahi, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris) were quashed on appeal.
The case was reinvestigated by Phil Jones, the former Head of South Wales Police CID. Jones was later jailed for corruption. His investigation fizzled out after an absurd insistence that police should be allowed to use up all the DNA if they wanted to. They were stopped from doing so and within six months an improved DNA testing system was announced by the now defunct Forensic Science Service. That system was crucial in resolving the Lynette White Inquiry.
A new investigation (Phase II) took four years to complete, but it made history. It became the first miscarriage of justice case in Britain to be resolved by the conviction of the real murderer. Jeffrey Gafoor’s guilt was proved by overwhelming evidence, especially the combination of forensic science and crime-scene evidence. It was in reality a simple tale, which suffered so many twists and turns that it became complicated.
The truth about Lynette’s murder was plain and obvious – don’t take my word for it, the evidence that cannot lie proves it, but in a trial allegedly necessary to put right what had gone wrong, the most compelling evidence of the innocence of the Cardiff Five never saw the light of day.
The Final Insult
Instead, a ‘scientifically ludicrous’ scenario was put forward. Angela Gallop said that it was ‘technically’ possible that there had been two attacks on Lynette. She never came close to saying that is what happened and with good reason. It flew in the face of logic. Gafoor could only remember inflicting 10-12 wounds. He accepted that there were more than fifty, including a vicious slitting of her throat.
The crime-scene evidence was never consistent with two attacks. It was known that the killer had cut himself. His cast-off blood had been located as early as 1988. The inquiry rightly proceeded on the basis that they were looking for a solitary killer – sexually motivated homicides almost always are committed by one person.
It was claimed that there had been two attacks – one by Gafoor and the other by the Cardiff Five, but if this had happened, why was there no trace of any of the Cardiff Five in that flat. The murder happened in the dead of night – there was no lighting. How could five men and at least two ‘witnesses’ have committed that murder and got out without leaving any trace of themselves or interfering with the plethora of evidence tying the real killer to his crime?
How could Gafoor alone have cut himself while inflicting comparatively minor injuries and the others had not? This defied belief, yet it has been repeated in the compensation case too. And yet again rather than call the scientific evidence that demolished this scientifically ludicrous scenario, it is allowed to pass unchallenged. History is being obliterated and the public is expected to foot the bill again without anyone or any institution taking responsibility.