Why is Britain refusing to compensate victims of miscarriage of justice?
|
Version 0 of 1. Welcoming guests to the Global Law Summit in London this week, the prime minister reassured the 2,000 delegates that “Britain continues to lead the way in promoting … the rule of law around the world”. But what sort of rule of law allows an innocent person to be locked up for many years and then denied any compensation for their wrongful imprisonment? Outside the summit jamboree, for which a ticket would cost you £1,750, were some people who could have given the delegates a slightly less rosy picture of Britain’s supposed superiority. They included those who had been wrongly convicted but who have been denied any redress under the ruling introduced last year, which virtually says that it is not enough to be innocent – in most cases you have to find the real culprit of the crime for which you were convicted before you can be compensated. Among those challenging the new regulation is Victor Nealon, a former postman, who was convicted of attempted rape in 1996. He served 17 years, 10 years longer than his recommended tariff, because he continued to protest his innocence. In 2013, after fresh DNA evidence taken from the clothes of the victim pointed to “an unknown male” as responsible for the crime, Nealon was freed with just £46 in his pocket to try to rebuild his life. The Ministry of Justice now declines to compensate him because, under the new rules, his innocence has to be proved “beyond reasonable doubt”. Another man who feels equally bemused by this is Barry George, whose conviction for the murder of Jill Dando in 1999 was quashed in 2007. The police file on who was the real murderer in this case remains open, but George has never received compensation for his time behind bars. There are a few cases where the real culprits of a serious crime for which someone has been wrongly jailed are later traced and convicted. Jeffrey Gafoor, the real murderer of Lynette White in Cardiff in 1988, was finally jailed in 2003 and compensation has rightly been paid to the Cardiff Three, the men wrongly convicted of that crime. (Shockingly, no member of South Wales police has yet been held accountable for their part in this scandal.) Colin Stagg, wrongly accused of the murder of Rachel Nickel on Wimbledon Common in 1992, has had the satisfaction of seeing her murderer, Robert Napper, locked up. But in most cases, there is no simple resolution. Nealon’s lawyer, Mark Newby, believes that the Ministry of Justice is now making it virtually impossible for anyone to be compensated unless someone else is convicted of the crime. The line from the ministry is that “there is no automatic entitlement to compensation but every application is considered on its merits”. The justice secretary has already made a fool of himself by trying to limit prisoners’ access to books So what is the rationale for denying compensation? Presumably it was seen by a government that has already slashed legal aid provisions as another handy way of saving money. But the money to be saved is relatively small: since 2008, payments have been capped at £1m in cases where the person has spent more than 10 years inside, and £500,000 in all other cases. Another factor may be that miscarriage of justice cases no longer attract the sort of media attention generated by the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, and Judith Ward. The television programmes that investigated them, Rough Justice and Trial and Error, have also been the victims of cost-cutting by broadcasters. The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, who launched the summit this week, has already made a fool of himself by trying – unsuccessfully in the end – to limit prisoners’ access to books and he may be reluctant to climb down now over another ill-conceived move. But summit delegates who are here to “celebrate judicial traditions and the fundamental importance of impartiality, integrity and fairness” might ask him, on behalf of the likes of Nealon and George, how any nation that professes to lead the world can wash its hands of those who have been so grievously treated by the criminal justice system. |