Free David Ferguson

Help to right a grave miscarriage of justice....

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Blog entry 2nd September 2016

Yet another month passes and my appeal counsel have still failed to make any measurable progress.

During August I did receive a letter from them. In this it was claimed that the forensic scientist instructed to re-test the forensic evidence is liaising directly with Kent police/CPS for access. However, I have seen no actual evidence of this. Also, my legal counsel are still making no effort to pursue the evidence that we know the prosecution continues to withhold and, which unrefutably proves my alibi.

Many would ask why I continue to instruct my legal counsel in view of these issues. The simple answer is that I have little to no choice because of the way legal aid for the convicted is now run. In addition, even if I could instruct new counsel it would all but set my appeal back to the beginning. These issues are why it is common for we wrongly convicted to spend decades in prison for crimes that we have not committed.

I know of two other prisoners at Wakefield whose appeals are being delayed due to their counsel failing to pursue cast iron evidence of their innocence or, failing to enter their appeals into court in a timely fashion. In one of these cases the prisoner has an unquestionable forensic report that not only proves his innocence, it demonstrates that the prosecutions' gun shot residue experts either willfully omitted to account for evidence that exonerated him or, they were so incompetent that they should be struck off from their field of practice. Oh, and incidentally, it wasn't this prisoner's legal counsel who sourced him and secured this new forensic report. It was I.

Again this prisoner is stuck with his ineffective legal counsel due to the way legal aid is controlled for convicted prisoners. The tax paying public should be asking questions of this. After all, these appeal solicitors are dragging cases such as ours out for decades at the tax payers expense. Add in to that cost that each year we spend wrongly convicted and in the High Security prison system costs between £45,000 and £62,000 (dependent upon which prison) and the needless cost to the tax payer is phenomenal.

My own wrongful conviction will have cost the tax payer well in excess of 1.25 million pound to date. The Ministry of Justice's own figures recognise that up to 20% of prisoners are probably victims of miscarriages of justice. Accounting for the average sentence of a prisoner in the High Security prison population, miscarriage of justice cases in this field will have cost the tax payer in the range of 576 million pounds. This figure doesn't account for the costs of the original police investigation or trial to gain the wrongful convictions either.

The cost of British "justice" for we who are wrongly convicted is unacceptable in every sense.