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Frank news
Category A Review Panel Report
After the unexpected decision to reduce Frank's security classification to Category B, the Category A Team promised that the
reasoning behind this decision would be issued on July 22nd - nothing has been heard from them since. However, the Director
of High Security did write to Chris Mullin MP with a version of events that explained the decision and Mr Mullin was good
enough to pass this letter on - read the letter here.
This version of events departs from the facts at several points (as you can see from accounts of the result of the appeal against
the Judicial Review and of the Sentence Planning Board in Newsletter 5). In Frank's view, this
is just a case of the system trying to save face, but I was a little taken aback at the apparent cynicism behind the decision.
Having for years refused to accept that there was sufficient "real evidence" of reduced risk to warrant a re-categorisation, and
having insisted that Frank complete some of the courses repeatedly recommended to him in order to provide such "evidence",
when forced into action by the courts to reconsider its approach, the Prison Service has immediately taken the path of least
resistance. Presumably, the hope is that the real issue (i.e. of what exactly constitutes evidence of reduced risk, and of how
the system should go about gathering it and considering it), will be allowed to slide back into the shadows. The result is, of
course, good news for Frank, but not such good news for others in his situation (i.e. maintaining innocence and making no progress
as a result). The system will continue exactly as before and anyone wanting to challenge it will have to go through the same sort
of protracted legal process that Frank has been through - and for many this will be an impossibility.
Transfer request lost
Shortly after Frank had heard, on July 1st, that he had been downgraded to Category B, he put in a request to be transferred
out of the high security estate - his home for the past 23 years! Having had no reply after several weeks, he asked his solicitor
to try to find out what was happening. Result? Apparently the prison had no record of Frank having submitted such a request.
Obviously, someone had slipped up somewhere. So Frank has submitted a second request, this time handing it in person to a senior
officer. We shall see...
Frank's correspondence held
Early in September, because he wasn't getting recorded delivery receipts back from the Post Office, Frank became concerned
that not all of his correspondence was getting through. Sure enough, on September 6th, Frank was called in to see the
prison's Head of Security and Operations who had the missing correspondence on his desk. He said he was concerned about the
content of the correspondence. It turned out that he was referring to the blog entries and to the instalments of "An Abuse
of Justice" that Frank has been regularly sending out to me. This latter work contains entries from Frank's prison diaries
- he has kept a diary throughout his sentence - together with a commentary on them given from Frank's current vantage point.
In Frank's view, this document gives a much more persuasive account of his rehabilitation than could emerge from any number
of offending behaviour courses.
Frank has been sending these instalments out to me for about a year - 1400 typewritten pages - so it seems a bit late
to be taking an interest in them now. Apparently, interest in Frank's correspondence was piqued when it was discovered
that the first name of Frank's personal officer appeared in one of the blog entries - an entry, by the way, that mentioned
this officer in an entirely positive light. (The name has since been edited out.)
The Head of Security sought assurances from Frank that there was no intention to publish "An Abuse of Justice" in its
current format and length, which Frank was able to give him. He also wrote to me seeking similar assurances -
here is his letter, and
here is my reply. I got no response to
this and so wrote a further letter,
which still produced nothing.
Update 21/10/09: I did eventually receive a reply which, though dated September 30th, arrived shortly after writing
this newsletter and which puts the case for locking the stable door. (
You can read it here.)
The current situation is that the last two instalments of "An Abuse of Justice" are still being held, but other
correspondence is getting through, though sometimes very slowly. Frank's latest letter tells me that the Head of
Security has returned the material to him but has told him that he will no longer be allowed to send any of the "Abuse
of Justice" instalments out of the prison. A letter is also, apparently, on its way to me notifying me of this decision.
The Head of Security has taken this action under a couple of Prison Service Orders - PSO 4411 (Correspondence) and PSO 4470
(Access to the Media) - but we would challenge his interpretation of these orders.
This whole episode reveals the extreme sensitivity of the authorities to any kind of light being shone into the dark
corners of our criminal justice system. Coincidentally, there is a bill currently progressing through parliament that
seeks to broaden the level of control that the state may exercise over prisoners' writings under the guise of preventing
criminals profiting from their crimes by writing memoirs. In a recent statement on the "Criminal Memoirs etc" bill,
Jonathan Heawood, Director of English PEN, said:
...the plans are far broader and more threatening than this title suggests. If Part 7 of the Coroners &
Justice Bill, currently passing through the House of Lords, becomes law, then anything that an ex-offender says or
does about his or her offence will be subject to state scrutiny until the day they die...This new law would affect
works of literature from Pilgrim's Progress to the prison diaries of Nelson Mandela.
This begins to sound even more Orwellian when applied to miscarriage of justice prisoners like Frank. Are they to be
prevented from writing about crimes they did not commit?
Appeal progress
On July 20th, the CCRC allocated a Case Review Manager to Frank's application for a review of his conviction for murder.
The review process will consider the issues raised in the application and assess what lines of enquiry or further
information is required in order to address those issues. Once this work is complete, the case will progress to the
decision-making stage. All of this is likely to take several months, but at least there is movement here.
Campaign news
The current focus of the campaign has been to question the risk assessment process of the National Offender Management Service.
In the current system, it is up to prisoners to demonstrate that they have "addressed" their "offending behaviour" by participating
in a number of offending behaviour courses. These are designed to challenge such behaviour and so bring about a change in attitude.
An important aspect of many of these courses is that a prisoner should acknowledge his "index offence" - the crime for which he is
in prison - and so come to terms with the behaviour behind it. It is by going through this process that a prisoner demonstrates
that the risk he presents to society has been reduced sufficiently to warrant release.
Prisoners who maintain their innocence are handicapped in this system because the process does not accept that there can be an
innocent prisoner. Many prisoners who maintain innocence find themselves in a vicious circle in which they cannot make progress
since they cannot demonstrate reduced risk. The inevitable logic of the system dictates that, if you say you are innocent, you are
less likely to make progress than a prisoner who accepts guilt, and more likely to serve over your tariff than that prisoner - and
Frank's experience certainly seems to bear this out.
Correspondence with the Parole Board
As reported in the last newsletter, in light of the disappointing report of Frank's last Mandatory Lifer Panel conducted by the
Parole Board, I felt I had to write to Sir David Latham, Chairman of the Parole Board, about the Board's apparent lack of any
independent approach to the risk assessment of prisoners who come before them. (
You can read the letter here.) Although I had a reply from the Parole Board's Complaints Officer in June, it was pretty anodyne.
I have since had a further reply, this time from the Head of Quality Unit. (
You can read the letter here.) The letter describes the Board's role, but does not really answer my criticisms of what seems
actually to happen when a Board panel conducts its business. In certain of Frank's panels, there has not been much sign of an
"inquisitorial approach" or that a panel "critically analyses" the information presented to it. Merely explaining the way it's
supposed to be does not begin to tackle the reasons behind why it is the way it is.
8th National Miscarriage of Justice Day Public Meeting
Sunday October 11th was National Miscarriage of Justice Day and, as in previous years, United Against Injustice held a public meeting
on the Saturday to coincide with this day. (You can
read about the meeting here.) Along with many of the other campaigners at the meeting, I went along to get a renewed sense of
purpose, hopefully to meet up with someone who could help us in some way, to get new ideas of what could be done to further our causes
- and, of course, to publicise our own individual cases. Like many others, I had brought a pile of fliers to set out on the table near
the entrance, hoping that someone's eye would be caught and something positive would be sparked into life as a result. (Here is the flier I set out for Frank.)
It would be a useful education for those who do not really accept that miscarriages of justice can occur to
attend one of these meetings. There they would meet many people who are living proof that they can and do occur all too frequently.
They would also learn how our system not only allows miscarriages of justice to occur, but then makes it very difficult to do anything
about it. As Dr Michael Naughton put it, the notions of innocence and guilt, which you would expect to be at the heart of any system of
justice, do not really figure in our system. Criminal investigations and the trials they lead to are often about what story the evidence
can be made to fit rather than who actually committed the crime. Likewise, the appeal system focuses on the adherence to the rules of
the original trial and on the presentation of fresh evidence rather than on considering whether or not an innocent person has been
convicted and a guilty person allowed to go free. The result is that many people are in prison who should not be and, just as importantly,
many people are walking the streets who should be in prison.
The speakers at the meeting were all excellent. One of them was Sandra Lean, author of "No Smoke - The Shocking Truth About British
Justice". Reading the introduction to that book recently, I was struck by the following passage (I hope she will forgive me for
quoting it!):
Imagine we are asked to vote for a new justice system with the following rules:
- The guilty verdict must be as a result of purely circumstantial evidence
- There must be glaringly obvious "reasonable" doubt
- There must be no DNA/forensic evidence linking the suspect to the crime
- The suspect must not have been identified by formal means at or near the crime scene
- There must be some suggestion of another person or persons being present at or near the crime scene (against whom no
charges are being pursued)
- There must be over-reliance on "expert" testimony, to the detriment of the suspect
- Crucial, unsubstantiated evidence must have been given by someone with a vested interest in the suspect being convicted
- There must be serious questions about timescale/ability of the suspect for it to have been physically possible to carry out
the crime
- Clothing must be a strong part of the prosecution's case
- Character assassination must be a strong part of the prosecution's case
- There must be evidence of pathologists/forensic scientists selectively interpreting evidence to the prosecution's own ends
- The suspect must be seen to have been of previous good character, and have no convictions/psychological conditions
Obviously, no one with an ounce of sense would agree to such a justice system. Yet all of the cases highlighted in this book have
at least 10 out of the 12 items listed above as critical features.
I suspect that, if you asked most people, they would say that the first two items alone should guarantee that either the accused is
not found guilty at trial in the first place, or that a guilty verdict is quickly overturned at first appeal. And most of them
probably believe that this is what actually happens. If that were the case, there would be no need for the "Justice for Frank Wilkinson"
campaign - or any of the many other campaigns being run by relatives and friends of innocent people currently serving time in our jails.
Another of the speakers at the meeting was Michael Shields, the Liverpool football fan wrongfully convicted of the attempted murder
of a barman in Bulgaria, and recently freed on a royal pardon after Jack Straw accepted that he is "morally and technically innocent".
It is a sobering thought to consider, as Michael Naughton invited us to do, what would have happened to Michael had he been found
guilty and imprisoned in our own country, and had he applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to have his conviction reviewed.
It is all very well for Jack Straw to put right a miscarriage of justice that occurred in another country - an action that carries
with it the implication that they do not do things elsewhere quite as correctly as we do here - but what is he prepared to do about
miscarriages of justice on his own doorstep? I feel a letter coming on!