Mouncher Investigation Report

MOUNCHER INVESTIGATION REPORT Author: Richard Horwell QC HC 292 July 2017 Return to an Address of the Honourable the House of Commons dated 18 July 2017 for the Mouncher Investigation Report Author: Richard Horwell QC Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 18 July 2017 HC 292 © Crown copyright 2017 This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: [email protected]. Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned. This publication is available at www.gov.uk/government/publications Any enquiries regarding this publication should be sent to us at insert contact details here Print ISBN 9781474145053 Web ISBN 9781474145060 ID 15051704 59801 07/17 Printed on paper containing 75% recycled fibre content minimum Printed in the UK by the Williams Lea Group on behalf of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office “The only way this case will fail is through disclosure.” Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Coutts Chapters Executive Summary 3 1. Introduction 7 2. The Murder of Lynette White: LW1 9 3. The Cardiff Five 15 4. The Cardiff Three 19 5. The Aftermath 25 6. The Murderer Identified: LW2 29 7. Investigating the Investigators: LW3 33 8. The Mouncher Investigation 47 9. The IPCC Report 49 10. The HMCPSI Report 63 11. Operation Dalecrest 67 12. The Judicial Review Proceedings and the Mouncher Investigation Terms of Reference 69 13. The Civil Proceedings 77 14. Overview 81 15. The Circumstances in which Counsel were Instructed 87 16. The Decision to Prosecute and the “Dysfunctional” Prosecution Team 97 17. The Circumstances in which the Trial Collapsed 107 18. What happened to D7447 and D7448 and the potential for confusion with another document 185 19. Disclosure 221 20. How the agencies responded to the collapse of the Trial 243 21. The 227 Boxes 261 22. The claimants’ concerns as revealed in their application for Judicial Review 269 23. Other Matters 275 24. Conclusions and Recommendations 279 25. Methodology 285 1 Appendices 1. Chronology 287 2. List of Principal Persons 303 3. Terms of Reference for the Mouncher Investigation 306 4. Terms of Reference for the IPCC Inquiry 310 5. Terms of Reference for the HMCPSI Inquiry 311 6. The E-Catalogue 312 7. The MG6C 315 8. The Entries on Holmes 318 9. DS May’s Note 322 2 Executive Summary Lynette White was just 20 years of age when in 1988 she was brutally murdered in a flat in Cardiff. Stephen Miller, John and Ronald Actie, Yusef Abdullahi and Anthony Paris, who later became known as the “Cardiff Five”, were prosecuted for her murder and in 1990 three of them were convicted: Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Anthony Paris. Those convictions represent one of the worst miscarriages of justice in our criminal justice system. The case against them comprised accounts from eyewitnesses; confessions to civilians; and a single recorded confession by Stephen Miller to police officers. Following the convictions, the main eyewitnesses withdrew their evidence as did most of the civilians to whom confessions were alleged to have been made. The Court of Appeal quashed the three convictions in 1992 because Miller’s confession to police officers had been obtained by oppression involving bullying, hostility and intimidation at a level that had horrified the three Court of Appeal judges. What is so perplexing about the prosecution of the Cardiff Five is that there was no scientific evidence against them when, if guilty, there should have been: the scientific evidence which was then available in fact tended to suggest that another and unidentified man had murdered Lynette White. Furthermore, the motive suggested for their killing her did not stand up to scrutiny. Due to advances in DNA technology, in 2003 it was discovered from blood found at the scene that the murderer was Jeffrey Gafoor. Gafoor confessed to murdering Lynette White on his arrest and in that same year he pleaded guilty to her murder. Gafoor’s explanation as to what happened, as disclosed in his plea in mitigation before sentence, was that he had murdered Lynette White on his own. He apologised to the Cardiff Five for what had happened to them and made it clear that he did not know them and had no connection to them. The focus then shifted to the original murder trial. How could five men be prosecuted for murder when, as later events were to reveal, they had nothing whatsoever to do with either the murder or the murderer? How could eye witness have put them at the scene when they had not been there? An investigation commenced into how and why civilian witnesses had lied and, in particular, into the police officers who had taken their witness statements. Eventually, in 2009, 13 police officers and two civilians were charged with offences of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury. The case against the police officers was that they had “moulded, manipulated, influenced and fabricated” the evidence against the five innocent men. There were to be two trials, the first of which commenced in July 2011 at Swansea Crown Court against eight of the police officers and the two civilians. The trial was beset by problems especially those concerning prosecution disclosure. On 28 November 2011, the trial judge ordered the prosecution to identify and produce a particular class of registered documents which would enable the court and the defence to test the prosecution’s ability to conduct its disclosure exercise in accordance with law. Documents were identified as falling within that class but could not be found. It was then believed that the documents, or some of them, had been destroyed on the instruction of the Senior Investigating Officer and that belief appeared to be confirmed by a note of a conversation between two police officers in 2010. That note had been found overnight and was produced at court the following morning. The prosecution then acted on the basis that the documents had been destroyed on the order of the Senior Investigating Officer and as a consequence, the prosecution decided that it could no longer have confidence in the trial and criminal process. Accordingly, on 1 December 3 Mouncher Investigation 2011 the prosecution offered no further evidence and the police officers in that and the following case were acquitted. Seven weeks later on 17 January 2012, the “destroyed” documents were found at the police headquarters, albeit not in the Major Incident Room where they should have been located; they were found by the Senior Investigating Officer in his office. Concerns of “establishment cover up” and “conspiracy” naturally followed. Did the investigators deliberately sabotage the trial to ensure that their accused colleagues would avoid conviction and the inevitable sentences of imprisonment that would follow? This investigation, which commenced in March 2015, was directed at discovering what had caused the trial to collapse and at investigating many related issues, principally involving the conduct of police officers and prosecution lawyers. This investigation follows a number of previous inquiries and a detailed judgment in connected civil proceedings. On the evidence it is clear that very few emerge with credit: too many aspects of the investigation and prosecution were poorly managed. But my principal finding, from which much flows, is that bad faith played no part in the errors of either the police officers or the prosecution lawyers. It is human failings that brought about the collapse of the trial not wickedness. The Senior Investigating Officer did not order the destruction of any material and as is already obvious, the documents believed to have been destroyed were not destroyed. Because of the note of the 2010 conversation, it has always seemed likely that a document was destroyed but one has never been identified. As a result of this investigation, I have found that a document was destroyed and that it was a summary or schedule of material held by the South Wales Police Professional Standards Department (PSD); it is referred to as the “Jones Briefing Paper”. The reason why I have excluded bad faith in its destruction is set out in detail in the report but it is important to understand that the Jones Briefing Paper was not an original document. A digital version, at least, of the document was always going to be available for inspection or use at PSD and there was nothing to be gained by the destruction of one of a number of hardcopy versions of it. The document was not considered as undermining the prosecution case and it in fact contained complaints from some of the police officers awaiting trial. Indeed, a prosecution lawyer had considered the document and had advised that it was then irrelevant to the investigation. The document was destroyed because originating from PSD it was rightly regarded as sensitive and there was no written policy as to how such documents should be managed. The lack of a clear policy led to a misunderstanding as to how the Jones Briefing Paper should be treated. That is a world away from a corrupt police officer destroying an original document that undermined the prosecution case. Notwithstanding the fact that the document was determined as being “irrelevant”, it should nonetheless have been registered and available for future inspection. It had not been registered and obviously was not available, at least in the Major Incident Room, for future inspection.

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