You could spend the whole meeting talking about just one of these.  I’ll outline what I see as the problems, and then move on to ideas of what might be done about them.

Start with examples.  Ones I’m familiar with.

Susan May –
to make a case against her, the police had to come up with a convincing story. 

Briefly, Sue looked after her elderly aunt, who lived on her own.  On the morning of 12 March 1992 she arrived at her aunt’s house and found the back door unlocked and her aunt dead in her bed, obviously murdered.  She rushed out to a neighbour’s house and phoned the police. 

A few days later, on 16 March, the police decided Sue was a suspect.  She was arrested a fortnight later, and subsequently convicted of the murder of her aunt.

There are just two pieces of evidence against Sue.  One is a question she supposedly asked of an officer in the case, which implied she knew about some scratches on her aunt’s face, which the police say she couldn’t have known about unless she was the murderer. 

Susan never asked that question. 

The other piece of evidence consists of 3 marks on the wall next to her aunt’s bed.  The police said they were bloodstains, and one at least probably did consist of the aunt’s blood.  Another one could have been blood, and in that one they found Susan’s palm print.  None of the experts could say how old any of the stains were.

The police case was that Susan had murdered her aunt in the dark, during the night before she found her, then made the marks as she left the room.

The problem with that, was that if Susan had touched her aunt when she found her in the morning, and got blood on her hands, and then touched the wall, the palm print could not be evidence against Susan.  To complete their story, the police had to get Susan to say she had not touched the body in the morning. 

When she found the body, Susan was deeply shocked.  She panicked and ran out.  She always said she thought she hadn’t touched the body, but she wasn’t sure.  Only a tiny amount of blood would have been enough to make the marks – her hands would not have been dripping with blood.  And there was wet blood on her aunt’s face. 

~

Now, if the police suspect you of a crime, they’re not supposed to interview you unless they tape record the interview, warn you that what you say may be given in evidence, and tell you that you have a right to legal advice. 

But the police chose to go on treating Sue as a witness, not a suspect, and they interviewed her as a witness (a clear breach of the rules, and the PCA agree with me, although the appeal judges don’t – but what do they know?).

Why did the police want to interview Sue as a witness rather than a suspect? because

then, as they always do, the officer wrote out the statement and said “Sign here” - and Susan signed.

And the police story was completed: by her own admission, the witness statement showed, Susan had not touched the body in the morning, so the marks on the wall were made by her the night before, when Susan beat and smothered the aunt to whom she was devoted.

Susan is still in prison.

I don’t think there’s anything unusual about how the police produced this evidence. 
In my experience and years of research, I’ve found that the police always ignore face values – such as what Susan told them – and used their power to find something hidden behind the face values, which they make sound more convincing because it was hidden. 

Of course, most witnesses don’t then become suspects, like Susan.  Most just go to court and say what it says in their statements.

But witness statements always follow on from unrecorded interviews and are then written by the police, never by the witness. 

And then the witness signs them, below a printed statement which says that they know they are liable to prosecution (for perjury) if what they say is false.

Why do witnesses sign false statements?

You may remember the Cardiff 3 case – 3 men convicted of the brutal murder of Lynette White.  Their conviction was overturned, and earlier this year a man was convicted after he admitted the murder when his DNA was matched to DNA at the scene.  Witnesses who gave evidence against the 3 have now been charged with perjury.  Their defence is likely to be that the police forced them to make statements incriminating the 3. 

We await the outcome of their trial with interest.

other incentives offered to witnesses include rewards –

and all these incentives, which are tools in the hands of the police, make possible the practice of trawling for suspects that we’ve seen in the cases of alleged institutional abuse, leading to a whole string of miscarriages of justice. 
Unfortunately we don’t have time to go into that here.  You can at least see how extensive the problem is – because the method of taking prosecution witness statements gives the police a powerful tool with which to produce the evidence they want in order to secure convictions. 

That was an example of how the police produce evidence

What about when they fail to produce evidence?

The case that sticks in my mind is that of John Brannan and Bernard Murphy.  They were convicted of the murder of Michael Pollitt in 1991. 

Briefly, Bernard and Michael Pollitt were enemies.  They met in a crowded nightclub – the Express Club in Manchester.  They were on opposite sides of the room, Bernard shouting threats at Michael.  Michael had anticipated this encounter and had obtained a gun, which was loaded.  He drew the gun, and attempted to fire it at Bernard – or so about 10 witnesses have said. 

Standing next to Michael was John Brannan, Bernard’s best friend.  For self-protection, he had a knife concealed in his boot, and he drew it in order to disarm Michael.  But, he told me, the crowd behind him surged forward, and he wasn’t sure what happened next, but the knife went into Michael, who fell dying on the floor. 

Most of the crowd left the scene fast, including Bernard and John. 

When they gave themselves up to the police a week later, John didn’t answer any questions, and he didn’t give evidence at the trial, on the advice of his lawyers. 

At first Bernard didn’t answer questions, but then he told the police that Michael had a gun.  The police said that that was the first time they’d heard anything about a gun, and they didn’t believe him. 

The trial was a disaster.  Witnesses who would have testified that Michael had a gun didn’t turn up.  The judge told the jury that if they thought Michael had a gun, then John was acting in self-defence.  But the jury didn’t believe Bernard – they believed the police.  They convicted John, and Bernard along with him as a partner in a joint enterprise. 

There was an appeal, and more witnesses came forward to say that Michael Pollitt had a gun in his hand.  But the appeal judges chose not to believe them.  Then the CCRC investigated, and found undisclosed material which revealed that from as early as two days after the incident, the police had been receiving information from various sources to the effect that Pollitt had had a gun. 

One source for example was quite detailed, including a description of the gun appearing to jam – a description which accords with Murphy's own account in interview. 

So for 10 years the police had known that Bernard was telling the truth, and they had concealed the information. 

The CCRC referred the case for a second appeal.  But just before they did so, the news came that John, deeply depressed by what had been done to him, and probably blaming himself for not telling the police what had happened, took his own life in prison.

The appeal was successful. 

There’s nothing unusual about what happened in this case.  In every case of alleged miscarriage of justice that I investigate, I feel certain that something is being kept from us. 

Sometimes we know it is, because PIIs –  Public Interest Immunity certificates – are issued.  This typically covers informers – grasses who don’t want their cover blown, who have received rewards or other favours, such as being allowed to get away with crimes. 

But other information – like the withheld evidence in the Brannan and Murphy case – we have to guess about.  And there are much more difficult cases, where wrongly convicted people don’t know what evidence might be missing because they don’t know anything about the crime – they weren’t there, they don’t know who was involved –often because there wasn’t actually a crime at all, as Michael Naughton has told us / will tell us.

The police can choose whether to turn the information they receive – intelligence as they rather quaintly call it – into evidence, or whether to let it disappear, often never to be known by anyone else. 

That’s why non-disclosure is a problem: because we don’t know that undisclosed evidence exists, we don’t even know what to ask for. 

What can we do about it? 

Before the CRIMINAL PROCEDURE AND INVESTIGATIONS ACT 1996 came into force, the police and the CPS had to disclose everything that might have "some bearing" on the offence charged and the surrounding circumstances of the case. 

We could demand a return to this state of affairs: not perfect, but better than what we have now.  But the tide is flowing the other way.  Things are steadily getting worse.

The police complained that they had to photocopy mountains of paperwork to hand over to the defence.  The reason they were failing to clear up crime was that they were snowed under by a paper avalanche of their own making. 

The 1996 Act required them to disclose only the prosecution material which in the prosecutor's opinion might undermine the prosecution.  A disclosure officer – a police officer – was to decide what should be handed over. 

Having seen that material, the defence solicitors must tell the prosecutor what their client’s defence is going to be.  The police can then go and intimidate defence witnesses, or find more witnesses of their own to counter the defence ones. 
Liberty has commented: “The real danger … is that prosecution witnesses will be ‘coached’ and defence witnesses will be interviewed by the police and ‘encouraged’ to change their story or be frightened off the prospect of given evidence at all.”

If a defendant fails to disclose material in advance of his or her trial, then this can count against them.  If the police or prosecutor fail to disclose relevant material, will they suffer?  What do you think?

We’d experienced the major miscarriage of justice cases of the early 90s – the Guildford 4, the Maguire 7, the Birmingham 6, all the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad cases, deeply embarrassing to the criminal justice system. 

This was the government’s answer to the problem: give the police – the very same people responsible for non-disclosure in many of these cases – the responsibility for disclosing the results of their investigations.  Give the police – whose job it is to build cases to obtain convictions and so clear up crimes – the responsibility for undermining their own work.  Put the fox in charge of the henhouse.

That way, we won’t be embarrassed by miscarriages of justice because no one will ever hear of them. 

The prospects for reform of disclosure procedures don’t look good.  There is now a criminal justice bill which will be forced through parliament by Blunkett and Blair, which strengthens the 1996 Act. 

I don’t have time to go through all the iniquities of this piece of legislation, which makes it much more difficult for defence solicitors to do their job properly.

If we can’t reform the problem of hidden evidence, what about witness statements – evidence which we at least know about?

Reform would be straightforward.  Record witness statements just like suspect interviews.  We could then hear all the questions and the full answers. 

The technology is readily available.  And it would make the police’s job easier.  No longer would they have to write out statements laboriously in longhand.

But ask yourselves: this reform would deprive the police of a powerful tool.  Is it likely that the police would accept its loss?

And remember: the police lobby affecting legislation is much more powerful than the protests of civil liberties campaigners.

But what we are primarily concerned about in our local organisations – the member organisations of United Against Injustice – isn’t long term campaigns for changes in the law, but winning cases – overturning wrongful convictions.

In the many cases in which we think witness statements are untrue, how do we challenge the claims of the witnesses?

We can

We can build our own knowledge of police investigation techniques,
leading to challenges to the core prosecution evidence in the cases we’re supporting

Disclosure is more of a problem, because what’s hidden is hidden – we don’t know that it even exists.  But we can at least find out what records probably do exist.  

We have to learn what records the police generate in the course of an investigation and what those records are likely to contain.

For example, in the case of Susan May I mentioned earlier, I discovered that the police had interviewed Susan as a witness when they in fact regarded her as a suspect, from the policy file – a record of the progress of the whole investigation – a document always produced in major investigations but rarely disclosed.  In Susan’s case, the policy file was not disclosed until after her trial. 

Just one example of the vast numbers of undisclosed records.

If we learn what is available, then we can use this knowledge when we demand that appeal lawyers and the CCRC do the thorough investigations that should turn up the fresh evidence we need for successful appeals.

So how do we build up the skills and knowledge we need to analyse witness statements and discover what’s being hidden from us?

Well, we probably have all the skills and knowledge amongst us already, simply because we’ve learnt them in order to help our friends in prison, but we’ve learnt them in isolation, finding it out for ourselves.

That’s how the criminal justice system likes it – us outsiders working separately and, too often, ineffectively.

It’s time we changed that.

What we need to do is to get together and share our skills and knowledge. 

And our knowledge covers a whole range of other matters that are important to us – other aspects of investigations, supporting cases, getting publicity, raising finance

We need a skills register – a list of people prepared to share what they know with others

and we need to run skill sharing workshops

Anyone interested in sharing knowledge and skills they’ve built up
and anyone interested in attending workshops (we could hold them anywhere in the country) should leave a message for me at the Innocent table, or contact me via our website

I will see what your response is, and then I’ll prepare proposals for the next business meeting of United Against Injustice.

And if your aim is to change the law and police procedure, then this work will support that aim.

We have to assemble evidence of our own which we can then use when we demand change.  Winning cases, exposing how people are fitted up, are the first steps on the road to ending miscarriage of justice.