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Judge for Yourself Book Review

Eric Allison @ The Guardian

6th December 2004

The Guardian appointed me as its prisons correspondent a year ago, becoming the first newspaper to employ a writer in that capacity. From the start I have received a steady stream of letters from prisoners and their families. On average, one letter a fortnight goes further than speaking of an injustice within the penal system; the authors claim that they - or somebody they are close to - are innocent of the charge that has landed them in prison. Many of them are serving a sentence of life imprisonment. All are seeking help and advice.

First, I pass on the words of Ann Whelan, the mother of Michael Hickey who was wrongly convicted of the murder of 13-year-old Carl Bridgewater. He served almost 17 years of a life sentence before being freed by the Court of Appeal. Ann fought tirelessly for her son's release and became a beacon for many of the campaigns that followed.

I once asked Ann if she had any advice for people who found themselves in a similar predicament. "Be prepared for a long fight" she replied, "and don't expect any help from the system that created the injustice."

Secondly, I say that they should start to organise and protest and that they should not put too much faith in the media. Gone are the days of TV programmes such as the excellent Trial and Error and Rough Justice. Newspapers will only take notice if and when friends and relatives of the alleged innocents have mounted a strong campaign, and even then they will find that miscarriages of justice are not high on most news editors' list of priorities.

Finally, I tell them that although they will need a good, committed lawyer, they should not expect any help from the legal profession in general.

From now on, I will also urge those who believe that they have been wronged to read this excellent book - as well as those who don't believe it possible that they could spend years in jail for something they did not do. It will tell them exactly what they are up against.

There is, I suspect, a perception that major miscarriages of justice are, if not a thing of the past, rarer now than they were in recent years. People think that things have moved on since the torrent of overturned convictions in such high profile cases as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, which seemed to dominate the news during the 80s and 90s.

This book will shatter any such notion, presenting, as it does, in the first part, a step-by-step exposure of the forces that work together to create miscarriages of justice. The second part deals with case studies of injustices in first person testimony, some now proven so, others who are still in a desperate fight to clear their names.

Starting with the way the police approach investigations and ending with both the Prison Service and Parole Board still refusing to accept that mistakes are made, the author expertly dissects the whole criminal justice system. It is a very well researched work, written with a passion that displays the author's rage at a system that should shame us all.

Most of the major, successfully appealed miscarriages of justice concerned life sentence prisoners who, after conviction, had to deal with a prison and parole system that, institutionally, refused to recognise the possibility that the court had got it wrong. Those that do protest their innocence of capital offences are referred to as IDOMs (in denial of murder). According to the system, if you have not 'come to terms with your offending behaviour' you represent an unacceptable risk to society and are invariably refused parole on those grounds.

For me, the most shocking section of the book concerns a woman who is in prison now and, given the track record of the system in righting its wrongs, will probably be there for a long time to come. By her own admission, she lived a parasitical life, almost certainly seen by the police, lawyers on both sides, judge and jury as low-life, and unfit to be a mother to her children. Read her story and decide whether or not she committed the murder that will prevent her from trying to be a good mother for a long time to come.

There is a highly significant factor of injustices that is often overlooked. As truly awful as it is that an innocent person should rot - often for decades on end - in our appalling jails, the question that ought to be uppermost in the minds of those who oversee the criminal justice system is this: who DID bomb Birmingham, or brutally murder 13 year old Carl Bridgewater, or commit the still unsolved crimes exposed by the steady stream of overturned convictions? It is almost certain that whoever was responsible will remain free.

The primary victims of those awful crimes, as well as those wrongfully convicted of them, deserve better. This book ought to be compulsory reading for those who preside over what is clearly still a corrupt criminal justice system; those who believe they have been wrongfully charged and those who don't know what the British criminal justice system is capable of doing to them.

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