Miscarriages of JusticeUK (MOJUK) 22 Berners St, Birmingham B19 2DR story, to understand why she is now serving a minimum of 15 years. Woffinden believes that Tele: 0121- 507 0844 Email: [email protected] Web: www.mojuk.org.uk all ten suspects should not have been convicted but he tells their stories in enough detail for one to understand why they were. Each tale unfolds like an intriguing television drama, with MOJUK: Newsletter ‘Inside Out’ No 627 (16/03/2015) - Cost £1 our judgements and preconceptions of innocence or guilt tugged both ways. Woffinden has ploughed an increasingly lonely furrow on the subject, following in the footsteps of Rough Justice: Who is Looking Out For the Wrongfully Convicted? two other campaigning authors. The first was Ludovic Kennedy, whose book 10 Rillington Place, Duncan Campbell: The letter from Whitemoor Prison in Cambridgeshire was in poor English published in 1961, exposed the wrongful hanging of Timothy Evans. The second was Paul Foot, who but its message was clear. The writer claimed he was serving a life sentence for a murder that campaigned relentlessly in Private Eye, the Daily Mirror and in books on many cases, including that he had not committed. What was also clear was that this was no ordinary case. Not only was of the Bridgewater Four, convicted of the murder of a newspaper boy, Carl Bridgewater, in 1978. the victim a respected author and photographer who lived in one of the most expensive streets Woffinden produced a volume called Miscarriages of Justice in 1987, and in 2015 he published Bad in London, but his alleged killer was the grandson of Chairman Mao’s third-in-command and Show, in which he suggests that Major Charles Ingram, convicted of rigging the TV quiz show Who an informant for MI6 whose entire defence at his Old Bailey trial had been heard in secret, Wants to Be a Millionaire? by placing allies in the audience who coughed strategically, was innocent. with reporters excluded from the court. It took some weeks to unravel the story of Wang Yam, What is striking about Woffinden’s latest volume, however, is his criticism of the media on three who was convicted of the murder of Allan Chappelow at his home in Hampstead in 2006. counts. “It is not merely that the media fails to draw attention to wrongful convictions when they occur; Wang had supposedly broken in to Chappelow’s letter box at his front gate to steal bank it is not just that trials leading to these injustices are misleadingly reported; it is that, in some details and, according to the prosecution, probably killed him when confronted. The victim’s instances, the media itself has played a key role in bringing about the wrongful conviction,” he writes. body was discovered several days later. For over two centuries, the media have been crucial to both freeing and convicting innocent In his letter, Wang claimed that because the press had been barred from reporting his suspects in murder cases. In 1815 Eliza Fenning, a household cook, appeared at the Old defence he had not received a fair trial. With my colleague Richard Norton-Taylor, I wrote a Bailey, charged with attempting to poison her employers with arsenic in their steak and story about the case that appeared in the Guardian in January 2014. Shortly afterwards, a for - dumplings. It was suggested that she had done so after being scolded for consorting with mer close neighbour of Chappelow contacted us to say that, after Wang was already in cus - young male apprentices. She protested her innocence and a radical writer, William Hone, took tody, someone had tried to break into his letter box, too, and that the intruder, when discov - up her case, visited her in Newgate Prison and launched a newspaper, the Traveller, to fight ered, had threatened to kill him and his family. In April, the Criminal Cases Review for her release. It probably did no harm to her cause that she was young and beautiful; the Commission announced that, as a result of this fresh evidence, the case was going back to artist Robert Cruikshank drew her reading the Bible in her cell. It was all to no avail: Fenning the Court of Appeal. It is now expected to be heard soon. Even though no murder trial had was hanged. And yet, ever since, writers and journalists have taken up such cases. ever been heard in such secrecy at the Old Bailey before or since, the media largely ignored Arthur Conan Doyle campaigned in the Daily Telegraph for George Edalji, convicted on the bizarre the story. Tales of alleged miscarriage of justice don’t make many waves these days. charge of disembowelling a horse in Staffordshire in 1903. Edalji, an Anglo-Indian solicitor, served As it happens, Wang Yam’s referral to the Appeal Court came just as a large book entitled three years’ hard labour but was eventually pardoned and concern about his conviction led partly to The Nicholas Cases arrived in my mail. It is by Bob Woffinden and the slightly obscure title is the creation in 1907 of the Court of Criminal Appeal. (Julian Barnes’s book Arthur & George is based a reference to St Nicholas, better known as Santa Claus, who in early Byzantine times halted on the case.) Conan Doyle, too, was active in the campaign to prove the innocence of Oscar Slater, the execution of three innocent men and could thus claim to be the patron saint of the wrong - a German Jew convicted of the murder in Glasgow in 1908 of Marion Gilchrist, a wealthy, elderly sin - fully convicted. And, boy, do they need a saint these days. The author takes ten cases, intro - gle woman. Class and anti-Jewish prejudice clearly played a part in the police investigation, and the duces us to the accused, tells their stories and shares the frustration of the convicted men and initial press coverage of the campaign to free him was dismissive. “Efforts most harmful and ill- women as well as their lawyers and families. advised are being made to work up popular feeling and to receive signatures with the object of Some of the cases may be familiar. Jonathan King, the former singer and music entrepre - obtaining a reprieve,” the Scotsman sniffed. “However amiable may be the sentiments that may have neur, was sentenced to seven years in 2001 for sexual offences against boys aged 14 and 15. prompted some of those who have taken part in the movement, it is one that cannot be otherwise What is less well known is that he was convicted not of offences relating to his original arrest, than mischievous and futile.” It took nearly two decades to prove Slater’s innocence. Scottish jour - but of others that came to light as a result of the media publicity surrounding his case. Another nalists played an important part in keeping the story alive. case is that of Gordon Park, convicted of the murder of his wife, Carol, who disappeared in Yet for many years there remained the feeling that such miscarriages of justice were very 1976 and whose body was found in Coniston Water in the Lake District in August 1997 (the few. Those who sought to question convictions in contentious cases were often mocked, as media named it the “Lady in the Lake trial”). Park was convicted in January 2005. He hanged was the case when the earliest doubts were expressed about the guilt of the Birmingham Six. himself in prison and in despair in January 2010. “Loony MP backs bomb gang” was the headline in the Sun when the Labour politician and jour - Other cases, such as that of Emma Bates, received less press coverage. In 2009 Bates was nalist Chris Mullin challenged their conviction. But with the vindication of the Birmingham Six, convicted of the murder of her violent and abusive ex-partner Wayne Hill in Birmingham. She the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and suspects in other so-called “Irish cases”, there was killed Hill with a single stab wound in a confrontation at her home, and it is hard, reading her finally a recognition that something was very rotten in the justice system. There followed a flowering of investigations into dubious cases. In 1982, the BBC media. launched the TV series Rough Justice, which carried out investigations over the next quarter- Not everyone who claims to be innocent is telling the truth, especially if the crime is especially century. Some of its journalists went on to found Trial and Error, which did the same for heinous. One case which received much publicity was that of Simon Hall, who was convicted in Channel 4 from 1993 to 1999. Concerns about the extent of such cases led to the formation 2003 of the horrific murder of Joan Albert, aged 79. It was taken up by Rough Justice after an in 1997 of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. It has since referred 629 cases back to active campaign on Hall’s behalf but then, in 2013, he told prison officials that he was guilty. In the Court of Appeal, 414 of which had been successful; a further 689 cases are under review. doing so, he gravely undermined the claims of many of the genuinely innocent. He hanged him - But both Rough Justice and Trial and Error were discontinued, victims of media austerity. self in prison the following year. As the former armed robber Noel “Razor” Smith notes in his wry Investigations into such cases take time and money. With broadcasters and news papers poem “The Old Lags”, prison is full of people who claim they were wrongly convicted: forced to tighten their belt, there is little appetite for researching complex claims that may lead But there is little editorial outrage about a murder trial being held in secret and scant concern nowhere.