Innocent man never free after decades in jail
SUNDAY , 26 FEBRUARY 2006
Donna Chisholm speaks to two men who spent 25 years in jail for crimes they did not commit, and visits the independent body in Britain that helped to quash their convictions. Such a body is being mooted for New Zealand, but tensions are rising among Britons over how theirs functions.
In the hall of shame of the British criminal justice system, Paul Blackburn was the boy who prison forgot.
Jailed at the age of 15 for the attempted murder of a nine-year-old boy in the north of England, Blackburn served 25 years in 18 prisons. He could have been out after 10 if he had admitted he was guilty.
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Blackburn never would - so they threw away the key. In May last year - two years after the Home Office freed him because it could not legally hold him any longer - the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction. The last the British public saw of him was in his grinning photographs outside court as he described his elation at the exoneration. But when I find him in Bristol, it is clear that Paul Blackburn is damaged beyond repair. "I got my body out of jail, but that's about it. I don't sleep and I'm weary to the bone." Ask what he's lost and he describes life's rites of passage. "I can't leave school at 16. I can't get my first job... I can't think about having a relationship, let alone getting married. I'm an absolute nightmare to live with because I can't stay in one place, physically and emotionally." He was released into a life far different to the one he had imagined on the outside - more difficult and more complex. |
 Paul Blackburn
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"The most incredible thing was that my life still wasn't my own. It didn't mean anything."
At 42, he is homeless and broke because he hasn't yet been compensated. He thinks about killing himself "every single day. It's the only control I ever really had in my own life".
The memories that keep him awake at night will never fade. "You see people dead and people get their throats cut, but they're all just war stories. The thing I find worse is not the stuff that happened to me. You hear the guy next door get the f*** shit kicked out of him by the screws and you know full well the guy is mentally ill and doesn't even understand why he's being beaten.
"Then you hear the screws run past giggling like schoolkids and they'll say, 'Did you see his head when he got kicked against the wall?' It sounded like they were just kicking a football."
The Criminal Cases Review Commission helped clear Blackburn's name. But his case in many ways typifies the frustrations over the way the law forces the commission to operate and the delays in investigations caused by a backlog of files inherited from the Home Office, which used to do the job.
The CCRC referred his case for appeal in August 2004 - three years after its investigation began, but more than a year after he had been freed.
In a review of New Zealand miscarriages of justice released last month, retired judge Sir Thomas Thorp recommended a body similar to the CCRC should be set up here.
Claims of wrongful conviction are now dealt with by two or three staff in the Ministry of Justice. Thorp believes that, based on British experience, up to 20 people are wrongfully jailed in New Zealand.
When we meet, Blackburn is one of the high-profile guests at an open day for Britain's fledgling Innocence Project, set up at Bristol University partly because of dissatisfaction with the CCRC.
The tension between the groups is suggested by their names. The Innocence Project is about the factually innocent - but in the corridors of the Birmingham-based CCRC, innocence is almost a banned word.
The commission's job is not about exonerating the innocent, but inquiring whether applicants' convictions are safe. It is legally obliged to take as much interest in the questionable conviction of a guilty child molester who has been illegally extradited, as it does in the case of a man wrongly convicted of murder by the faulty evidence of an eye witness.
It can refer cases back to the appeal court only if there is a real possibility the court will overturn the conviction.
It's a distinction which irritates people like Blackburn and Innocence Project founder, law lecturer Michael Naughton.
The public believes, says Naughton, that the CCRC's job is to help innocent people who are wrongly convicted. "It doesn't fulfil that function. When we were informed that we would get this independent body, we thought victory had been won, but we didn't look at the fine detail."
The CCRC had to find fresh evidence, or evidence of a breach of process during the prosecution -say a misdirection from the judge -to have the case reheard.
The result, says Naughton, is that the CCRC routinely refers to appeal applicants it knows are guilty.
"I'm not saying they go down to the pub to celebrate - they may do it with a heavy heart - but they don't have a choice."
Naughton's Innocence Project is an attempt to redress that. It involves five teams of law students, each working with a local lawyer to investigate serious cases - mostly murder - where inmates believe they can prove their innocence.
Most have been turned down by the CCRC.
While hundreds, if not thousands of British inmates maintain their innocence, Naughton says the pleas of about 10 inmates a week who seek help from his group suggest "a lot of people who say they are innocent are not".
Often it's about degrees of guilt - the woman who says she killed her husband, but shouldn't be guilty of murder because he beat her up; the man jailed for sex with a minor who says it's not illegal where he comes from; the child molester who says the law has changed and you can now have consensual sex with a 16-year-old...
Some who claim they are innocent undoubtedly are. But Naughton says the Home Office regards every such inmate as being in denial. The system rewards only those who admit guilt - and the sooner the better - with sentence reductions and earlier parole.
"If you maintain your innocence you never come out. People have been in prison for 40 flipping years because they won't admit to a crime they say they didn't do."
It took more than 10 years for anyone to begin to listen to an illiterate, inarticulate kid like Paul Blackburn.
When his conviction was quashed, the appeal court accepted that his confession had been fabricated - bullied out of him by two police officers when he had no legal representation.
The police found the trigger point for his vulnerability - his abusive father - and gnawed at the wound.
What sticks in his mind are not the beatings, but the policeman's face in his.
"He looked like me dad. He looked like me dad! He was screaming in my face and it's one of the things I remember more than anything else as a kid. The first time it happened I must have been three or four. My dad was standing on my mum's hair on the landing and I must have said something because he grabbed my T-shirt and started screaming in my face. It was loud and so scary and I was so frightened."
And now the cops were doing the exact same thing. As he recalls it, the man becomes a boy again and begins to cry.
Abandoned by his family and educated by the other inmates, Blackburn was sustained by an unswerving faith in himself.
"All the people who come out of prison in this situation do have that faith that they are going to win; that sense of determination, that sense of right. I went in a very, very f-----;-up, disturbed young kid. I came out with a lifetime's worth of agony, I suppose. But also a lifetime's worth of experience, because no matter what they tried to take away from me, they could never take away who I was. They could never ever take that sense of self away from me."
Up at the Birmingham headquarters of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, cases like Blackburn's give staff the biggest buzz.
Only 4% of claims of wrongful conviction are referred to the Court of Appeal, so the chance of finding a truly innocent man - as opposed to someone with a procedural claim -is a rarity.
"You really do have to put innocence out of your mind," says former Scotland Yard top cop, Baden Skitt, one of the commissioners who decides whether cases should go back to appeal. "There are relatively few cases where absolute innocence jumps off the page at you."
The CCRC has investigative powers that Skitt as a police officer could have only dreamed of. It can see all documents held by a public body - including the National Health Service. That means a rape complainant who sees a doctor could find her patient notes pored over by CCRC investigators.
Such access has led to convictions being quashed -for example, when a complainant gave a different version of events to her doctor than she gave to the court.
CCRC chair Graham Zellick says that in these cases, inmates have been freed without knowing why. Privacy provisions mean the information cannot be revealed other than to the court.
In its first decade, the CCRC has operated in a benign political environment. The string of wrongful convictions and Home Office inaction from the 1970s and 80s relating to IRA bombing suspects -the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six and Judith Ward among them -triggered widespread public alarm and the royal commission which led to the establishment of the CCRC.
But today, Muslims are the new Irish and after the London terrorist bombings last year, public and political sympathy for the rights of the wrongly accused appear to be waning.
The CCRC is facing the first cuts to its 8.5 million ($22.5m) budget -down to 7.9m this year from last and to 7.6m by 2008. But Zellick stresses that's the result of across-the-board pressure on government departments rather than any attempt to rein in the CCRC.
Zellick is pushing for greater efficiency at the commission. He's unhappy with the time inmates wait - 12 to 18 months for a review to begin on complex cases, although most are allocated or rejected within six months.
Recently, the CCRC referred a 15-year-old case to the appeal court over a Town and Country Planning Act conviction where the penalty was a 400 fine.
"I wouldn't have wanted to spend an hour of our time on that case when there are people in prison, some of whom ought not to be there. I simply can't justify that."
Part of the problem is the effect of the law which set up the commission.
"Parliament started from an assumption that you could judge very early on whether a case had merit and the vast majority could be thrown out at a very early stage. But that was the single most conspicuous weakness of the old system. We've got to speed things up. It's just not good enough."
CCRC critics say its 4% referral rate is too low, a view Zellick rejects.
"The overwhelming majority of cases disclose no reason for questioning the safety of the conviction - and these are a self-selecting group who are certain their convictions are wrongful. That tells us something."
He also rejects criticism from people such as Birmingham Six member Paddy Hill that case review managers - the CCRC has 50 on its 100-strong staff - are too young and inexperienced to sniff out injustice.
Some who have the highest referral rates have never been at the legal coalface, he says, but have the skills and dedication required of investigators.
"Young people can be quite good at finding injustice. They have a great deal of idealism and energy."
Only 245 of the CCRC's referrals have been heard by the court of appeal in nine years, and about 70% have had convictions quashed. The commission says if all were quashed, it would mean the bar it had set for referral was too high.
Zellick does not believe there are widespread failures such as the police violence and corruption that existed before the laws covering interviews with suspects were tightened in the 1980s.
"But the belief that juries never convict the innocent is a mistaken view. Looking at some of the cases we've dealt with, I'm just astonished anyone could say that was proof beyond reasonable doubt."