Punishing the innocent

By Mark Rowney

Miscarriages of justice. Whilst it is a travesty that they occur and every effort should be made that they don’t occur, it is inevitable that they will occur in a judicial system designed and run by imperfect human beings. However, we should not allow the victims of a miscarriage of justice to suffer more than the guilty would during their incarceration, nor should we permit the innocent to continue to suffer after their release.

In January 2001, I went to a presentation that I’ve never forgotten.

The first speaker was a man called John Kamara who had just been released from prison. In 1981, John Suffield was tortured and brutally murdered during a robbery at a betting shop in Liverpool. However, Kamara wasn’t one of John Suffield’s killers; but Kamara was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent 19 years in prison.In the end, he was released after the Court of Appeal was told that the police had kept 201 statements “hidden” which, when reviewed, completely exonerated Kamara. Even the victim’s father, who had called for Kamara’s hanging in 1981, publicly acknowledged his innocence.

The other speaker, was Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six and his story was not just of injustice but of torture as well. However the stories of how these men had been found guilty in the first place are not what struck me the most but what happened after their conviction. Following a conviction of “guilt”, if a person continues to protest their innocence, his/her treatment is very different to those who acknowledge their guilt. The State sees it as an essential part of the rehabilitative process to encourage all prisoners to admit their guilt, using both the carrot and the stick. It is not in prison’s remit to ask itself, if a prisoner continues to maintain innocence, might he/she be telling the truth? Kamara refused to admit his “guilt” and so he spent 16 of his 19 years of imprisonment in solitary confinement, with no human contact for 23 hours a day. According to his prison files, he wrote over 300,000 letters protesting his innocence.

Then there is the question of parole. Naturally an innocent person would want to clear their name, but they would also want to be released as soon as possible and to continue their campaign for justice on the outside. The Parole Board categorically denies any policy requiring a prisoner to admit guilt and expresses remorse before granting parole. However, in practice it is very difficult for someone who continues to protest innocence to get parole.

If Kamara had admitted his “guilt”, he probably would have been released around 1993. He would have been assigned a parole officer, been found a home and a job, offered counselling or other mental health support as necessary. He would have been prepared for the world outside in advance being released for shorter periods of time at first, until he was accustomed to the world outside which had changed so much between 1981 and 2000.

Instead, Kamara found himself suddenly outside the Court of Appeal, a free man. He was given £46 and a bus pass that would expire at 8pm that night. He had the clothes he stood up in. That was it. No job, nowhere to stay that night. If Paddy Hill hadn’t offered Kamara his sofa, Kamara would have slept on the streets.

Kamara’s story isn’t unique. Once declared innocent, victims of miscarriages of justice are still kicked out on the street by the State. They are on their own. And of course, they often have (or develop) mental health problems and/or substance abuse. They also face not so obvious difficulties adjusting. Kerbs – there aren’t any in prison, so Kamara found he was tripping over them all the time. Everything is grey in prison and so colours can be difficult to process. Shops gave Paddy Hill panic attacks because of all the choice; inevitably he would leave with just a packet of cigarettes.

Of course, Kamara eventually received compensation, but this is notoriously difficult. In 2006, Labour changed the law to make it more difficult, cutting the budget, capping payouts and refusing compensation to those released at the first attempt at appeal. What’s more, in most compensation applications, the State argues that no wrong was done because the applicant was convicted then appealed and won. Due process was therefore followed and democratic rights protected. Whilst this approach has merit when it comes to sentencing appeals, when an appeal results in a declaration that a conviction is unsafe, I attach less weight to it, especially in the case of lengthy imprisonment. A person’s liberty has been wrongfully deprived. The process of recognising that injustice should not deprive the victim the means to reintegrate into society.

It typically takes 9 months to simply establish eligibility for compensation and years to conclude proceedings. Kamara waited five years for full payment. In the meantime, he found that he could not access benefits because he had no national insurance number and had not been paying national insurance. And it’s not as if 16 years in solitary prepares you for employment. When his compensation was finally awarded, the government withheld £75,000 as payment for Kamara’s “board and lodgings” during his wrongful incarceration. Talk about a kick in the teeth.

Since the Criminal Justice Act 2003, it is possible (unlike other democracies) for the State to have a second attempt at trying someone on the same or similar charges on which they have been tried before. This is wrong (but not the point of this piece). It means that, albeit with difficulty, someone attempting to frame you can just keep on coming. It follows that if the State says that a “not guilty” verdict is not safe and open to doubt, then as a “guilty” verdict is reached by the same process, it too cannot be safe and absolute. The verdict should be deemed questionable the moment it is reached and we should not wait until a formal appeal process is begun before the penal system begins to contemplate that possibility. I am not calling for radical overhaul. Just a tweaking of the penal system that in short means that more attention is paid to these protests of innocence than is currently the case, acknowledging that some of those who are guilty will be chancing their arm. No one should be systematically denied benefits or locked in solitary, just because they continue to say “I didn’t do it”.

When released, the victims of our errors should not simply be thrown out into the street. Whilst improving the system of compensation would be welcomed, it is not enough. These victims should be offered a “half way house”, be it a hotel or a hostel. We should make every effort to find them a job and provide medical and emotional support. We should in short, live up to our moral responsibilities to those we have wronged. We should treat them with more respect than those who have actually raped and killed. At present, we do not.

Mark Rowney is a Lawyer and a member of Battersea Labour Party