Blog entry 8th July 2018
How many 'cop' show series or 'crime' series have you watched? Inevitably in any police or crime series an episode is given over to the re-investigation of a conviction in which the convicted person is innocent. Of course the 'new' investigation goes on to exonerate the wrongly convicted person and convict the real perpetrator. Usually the closing scene shows the innocent and wrongly convicted person forlornly passing through the prison gates to meet the person or persons responsible for their eventual exoneration.
If only these events happened in real life and within the British penal system. Without doubt there are hundreds if not thousands of innocent people in British prisons. If you doubt this consider the facts. In the past few months 47 sexual assault cases have had to be dropped due to it being uncovered that police in one region had been failing to properly investigate the defendants claims of innocence. In truth police forces across Britain have been systematically withholding and, or hiding evidence that indicates an accused individual's innocence. These cases have only come to light because of the cases of one or two individuals whose families forced the release of the evidence being withheld by the investigating (and corrupt) police force.
Now, justice has been served for those 47 cases. What about the hundreds if not thousands of us who have been wrongly convicted and are sat rotting in prison knowing that evidence has been withheld in our cases by corrupt police forces who don't care who they convict, as long as they convict someone at any cost. Whilst the recent review of on-going cases have halted the previously identified 47 cases, no review has been ordered or, is going to be ordered into cases that have led to convictions and imprisonment. If a review over a couple of months focusing on one police force revealed 47 cases that would have likely led to innocent people being sent to prison, how many thousands of cases have been missed before this police misconduct and corruption scandal was exposed?
Unlike TV crime series we have no-one re-investigating for us. Even when we wrongly convicted secure proof from the police ourselves that they have withheld evidence that proves our innocence, more often than not our solicitors don't follow up on it because they are so obsessed and distracted by forensic evidence such as DNA. Sadly DNA is seen as unquestionable evidence in court cases. That could not be further from the truth.
DNA can be planted, it can be transferred, its match estimation between two samples can be vastly over-estimated, it can be misinterpreted by a forensic scientist being 'encouraged' to make a case by the investigating police force. What it is not is irrefutable evidence of guilt. Perhaps if a jury had all the evidence before them, especially that which numerous police forces have found it necessary to hide from juries, those same juries may well have been less inclined to convict on misrepresented DNA evidence presented by conviction rate driven police and Crown Prosecutors.
What I want to know is when will my case and the hundreds maybe thousands of others that have had forensics misrepresented and evidence of our innocence withheld by the police and CPS re-investigated as happens in the TV crime series?