The Rights of the Forgotten Victims – Undue Leniency

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (January 31^st 2009)

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?