Comment: Innocent die in prison because of appeal flaws

By Director, Emily Bolton

This comment piece appeared in The Times. Click here to read it there.

Derek Bentley was hanged 67 years ago on Tuesday at the age of 19 for the murder of PC Sidney Miles at a warehouse burglary in south London. Bentley was innocent of this crime – his conviction was posthumously quashed. Had he been allowed to live, he would be 86 years old.

What has our justice system learned from making the ultimate mistake? Can we be sure that it is capable of averting such catastrophes today?

The answer is absolutely not.

While capital punishment has been abolished, were Derek Bentley to be convicted today, the likelihood of that conviction being overturned through our current appeal system is infinitesimal. The British justice system is in denial about its inevitable mistakes.

Our Court of Appeal is unable to detect and rectify errors for the simple reason that no one has the combination of access to the evidence and time to analyse it that is required to be able to present judges with a complete picture of the case. People in this country know more about the murder conviction of a teenage salvage worker in Wisconsin than they will ever know about victims of miscarriages of justice here. Unlike in the US, here the justice system cannot be held accountable – by Netflix or the courts. And this is because, by law, the evidence of the system’s mistakes is effectively hidden – from the accused, the jury, the convicted, their lawyers, the Court of Appeal, and the public.

In most US states the law allows police files to be accessed by a would-be appellant, and a transcript of the trial has been provided by right, free of charge, since 1956. But in the UK, appeals are decided without access to these vital documents. The wrongfully convicted remain trapped in prison, unable to show an effectively hoodwinked Court of Appeal why their claims of innocence should be heard.

There is more than one way for the state to take the life of a person sent to prison for a crime they did not commit. We may not pay the hangman anymore, but Father Time can do the job just as effectively.In five years, three of the prisoners I represent have died in prison while fighting to clear their names. Another gave the eulogy at his wife’s funeral shackled to a prison guard. Ironically, had they been on death row in the US, they might well have been exonerated before that. In this country, there may be no execution date looming, like there was for Derek Bentley, but time, and life, is running out for the wrongfully convicted behind bars.

Emily Bolton is the founder and director of Appeal, a charity that fights miscarriages of justice; she previously founded Innocence Project New Orleans, in Louisiana