Rough Justice, No Justice

[00:00:00] The Y curve with Phil Dobby and Roger hearing.

[00:00:04] Justice delayed? Justice denied?

[00:00:07] How many innocent people remain in prison for crimes they didn't commit?

[00:00:11] Just because the system is too slow and cumbersome to exonerate the post office scandal show how hard it is

[00:00:16] to turn around miscarriages of justice even when it's clear to all that the courts got it wrong.

[00:00:22] And when every few years a case does get overturned and someone walks free, They've actually said, no, no, you didn't do it after all. Despite the fact that it's pretty obvious, then most of them have been. Yeah. So what you do, I mean, do you just then say, well, OK, there's been a miscarriage, broad miscarriage of justice. Let's just let them all out. Well, the idea of that is what the government's proposing at the moment. But then, you know, the judges are saying, hang on a second. This is not a big bad precedence, isn't it? Well, it is. But the point more generally is that there are many cases,

[00:01:43] apart from the post office, where people have been

[00:01:45] banged up for many, many, many, many years. that actually no, it didn't. So wonder is it happening, I mean if you take out the post office as you know as an example then put that aside. I wonder whether we're seeing more miscarriages of justice or less. You would have thought that there's so much more information available now that you know if you're tracking somebody you can see what their online behaviour has been, your 4 to try and make the system work better, but it is incredibly slow, incredibly unwieldy, extremely inefficient. I say this with some noise because many years ago and we're going to talk to Glenn in a moment, Glenn Maddox, a solicitor. But I worked with him. All right, yes, you're not going to tell me he's been 25 years old.

[00:04:21] He's gone inside.

[00:04:22] He worked for the VPC for that long.

[00:04:24] It's a coincidence. a translator from the wrong form of Chinese. So I mean, it just couldn't have gone worse. I mean, it was horrendous. And this man was jailed for life. Right. Because his defense wasn't very good, because he couldn't understand what was going on. Pretty much, pretty much. And he said to me, he hadn't got a clue what was going on really, and learned English it over the years, and finally worked out what had gone on. And if you do, I mean, if you get to the end

[00:05:40] of this whole process and you're found

[00:05:41] that there has been a miscarriage of justice,

[00:05:44] how do you compensate somebody who's just

[00:05:45] had their life taken from them?

[00:05:47] That's the big thing. a considerable number of those are magistrates court cases where someone may have had some sort of brush with the law in terms of even something minor, not necessarily a long prison sentence or whatever, but feel that they're innocent or that they've suffered a miscarriage of justice. But the ones that become high profile, the ones that are in a way are interesting, are

[00:07:03] the ones where someone has been in prison for a significant amount of time and there's I think went wrong with the actual trial or whatever. Judge is summing up all those sort of technical things. I don't think there are grants for an appeal, but there is, I think, some organizations set up in the Midlands. I don't know where exactly which you can apply to. Over to you because I'm afraid I've run out of money. Legal aid is stopped now.

[00:08:22] And they may take an interest in your case.

[00:08:26] Interesting.

[00:08:26] So talking about something being technically correct, But the appeal court traditionally isn't, only looks at the mechanics of the trial. It doesn't really look at the innocence or otherwise of the person concerned. They would look at whether the judge is summing up, whether the was okay, was sound, whether all the various points were put in front of the jury, whether the barristers did their

[00:09:44] job properly, although that's another interesting issue. go. I've been now been to the court of appeal, the court of appeal turned my appeal down, but I'm still want you to have a look at my case. And the CCRC will then go through a sort of screening process and they'll say, okay, explain to us why you didn't do it. What other fresh evidence is there? Is there a new witness? Is there some DNA? Is there

[00:11:00] something this is what they should do, by the surface and they didn't do the work that they should have done to actually have the DNA that was available that wasn't Malkinsons tested. Had they done so much earlier on, he would have been released much earlier, or his appeal would have gone forward much earlier. How long did he spend in prison? 17 years.

[00:12:20] Wow.

[00:12:21] So after that time, I would want, I don't something which brawls down to, you know, in the first place, is negligence by the police, by individual police officers? Can I see? Can I see the CCRC? Or by the CCRC as well. Can I sue these people? Well, that's an interesting part. I think Victor Neil and Celeste did think about whether or not there was a duty of care

[00:13:44] on the CCRC to him.

[00:13:46] I'm not quite sure what was concluded, but everything seems to have that attached to it nowadays. A I think they all naively thought that someone would be wrongly

[00:16:20] convicted. They would then write to the CCR now, mid 50s, 53. He had a quite a severe brain injury when he was a small child. He's what is called and said all along that Oliver wasn't with him. This was a murder case, is that right? This is a murder case, yeah. A murder case in Hackney in the 19th.

[00:19:01] So why was Oliver placed there?

[00:19:03] That's the one person who was involved saying he wasn't and yet still he was. November. And then there was a series of interviews with police officers, which ended in Oliver, without his solicitor being present, making a confession. Right. But that happens a lot a bit, I think. Yeah, but it does. Under Pace, the police and criminal evidence, that's not supposed

[00:20:20] to happen, is it?

[00:20:21] Absolutely, certainly isn't. But Pace was six to give an identification evidence, I would take, I would withdraw it from the jury immediately, this case. So he was a very unreliable person. So effectively, what convicted Oliver was his confession.

[00:21:43] I'm looking at another case I saw online't know, a thousand years or so.

[00:23:00] They've reversed that once you've been exonerated or your conviction has been questioned.

[00:23:05] You now have to prove beyond reasonable doubt, which is what Andry Malkinson has to prove it and I got some enormous help from a very experienced QC in those days. Casey, now Michael Burnvane and he and I are still working on the case 24 years later. We were very keen on the rough justice team doing a detailed investigation because obviously

[00:24:20] they can find things that we haven't want to get involved in the nitty-gritty of this. It's not for us to decide whether or not they should have referred it or not. It seems not an unreasonable decision, you know, using the reasonableness test that they use for judicial review.

[00:25:42] And they tend us down, even though, you know, as far as we would consider,

[00:25:45] it was a black Shrewsbury cases about 30 people with with what's his name, Tom Lenson. Yeah. Yeah, he was involved in that forgotten that they called now the Shrewsbury cases that was about 30 referrals. And this was to do with with evidence with them.

[00:27:04] Well, just the way in which the law changes saying the number of legal aid cases has gone down from almost a million in 2010 to 130,022. So getting on for a 90% decrease. I mean, a lot of these will be very small cases, obviously. But if you can't afford to defend yourself.

[00:28:20] Absolutely.

[00:28:21] That's an issue.

[00:28:22] That is going to produce more and more miscarriages going forward

[00:28:26] rather than less. happy if out of a prison population of 85,000, maybe 5,000 people have not guilty. We seem to cope with that. And they do their time and they come out and they feel very hard done by understandably, because just imagine how you would feel if you were in prison.

[00:29:40] I wouldn't hack it.

[00:29:42] Exactly.

[00:29:43] I almost said I'd try kill myself.

[00:29:44] I think if I said to him.

[00:29:45] Well, there you are then. There's phone. It was a rape case. I don't know if you which was vital halfway through their trial. And then the trial was then stopped.

[00:32:23] They were all set free and a couple of weeks with mental health problems. And they're the ones who struggle when it comes to actually, you know, doing something about the fact that they've been wrongly convicted, they can't deal with it. I mean, the other, the other factor,

[00:33:40] which is vital is that those fact, almost extremely rare, one in 100 years, sort of thing. Murdering your wife is quite unusual. Murdering your two children, age nine and seven, is extraordinarily rare, apparently.

[00:35:02] And he said to me, if my legal team was a disaster,

[00:36:25] they'll say okay fine what do you want us to do about that? The court of appeal will that Oliver wasn't involved. That might be crucial in getting it reopened. Sadly, I found that he wasn't well, and he died a year or two later. But I did ask him in the meeting I had with him, did Oliver do it? And he shook his head and said, no, no, no. But he was suffering severe mental health problems at that time.

[00:37:42] Anyway, we still kept it alive in the best way. First of all, a broadcast program, Rough Justice, to get to somewhere, and obviously there are parallels with what happened with the ITV drama about the post office there. Absolutely. But secondly, that in the end, it just happens to be getting an MP to write a letter, but it just seems extraordinary that, I mean, there's no way I guess Oliver on his own could ever

[00:39:01] do that.

[00:39:02] Raise and non-millennias, raising the Pope profile into the frame. Because in the old days they would make speeches and they would raise constituents problems and ministers would take notice. And I've been encouraging other people who come to me saying, what do I do about this case? For that case, I say get your local MP to make

[00:40:22] a speech and that has a comment about this case. Take care. Cheers. Bye. Bye. Right. Well, that I mean that all I'm completely scared by what could happen Yeah, but they realize none of us are safe. No, I tell us something else. We're not safe from come on tell us Donald Trump They have very true. Well, maybe we don't know. We don't know how come in just look. I mean the support within the Republicans

[00:41:43] Yeah, obviously, I mean, you know, to international relations, to the global economy. So Donald Trump and Kia Starmer, how are those two going to get on? So you're making at least two assumptions there, but yeah, I know, we're fairly safe assumptions there, both case adding up. Well, no, maybe not in Trump's case, but yeah, I mean,

[00:43:04] just the, you know, the shift in politics that's going to emerge out of all of this. So,