The Supreme
Court ruled upon the
Kevin Nunn case recently when the judges decided prisoners should not
retain the same rights concerning disclosure of the evidence as they had
pre-trial. Once an individual is convicted they cannot simply request access to
documents or forensic samples as they could, had such a request been submitted pre-trial.
This stance
by the Supreme Court judges is puzzling me. What they are saying is the
Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) can be trusted to request any document
or forensic sample to be re-tested and re-examined as they have what is known
as ‘Section 17 Powers,’ (S.17) to request disclosure of everything should they
choose to do so.
At one level
this statement is 100% correct, but the Supreme Court judges are well aware of
what the reality is. The CCRC will not deploy their powers under S.17 in 99% of
the applications made to them for further investigations. They have so many
requests for help in re-investigation of possible miscarriages of justice that
a case workers sifting process can take many years to be completed and the
person in jail and contesting their conviction has almost no opportunity to
search for ‘fresh evidence’ capable of casting real doubt about the safety of
their conviction.
The CCRC
require the applicant to submit compelling fresh evidence before deploying
their S.17
Innocent
people will have no insight into the circumstances surrounding the crime they
are convicted of. Therefore, they won’t have any idea about what areas of the
evidence it was that police used against them which should be open to
questioning its validity. An innocent person will know nothing more than the
fact they didn’t do it.
In my own
case I’ve had to suggest specific reasons why the silencer evidence was wrong. I
also had to set out how I believe the silencer evidence was falsified using
snippets of information gleaned from random documents. As more and more
material evidence was disclosed to me during the last 28 years (particularly
since the 2002 appeal) my arguments got closer and closer to the truth.
Multiple police enquiries and 16 years with the CCRC as well as two appeal
hearings and a trial, along with tens of thousands of hours hard work reviewing
three and a half million pages of case documents and it is only now we know
what Essex police concealed about the silencer.
Since 2002
we have had to fight tooth and nail to obtain two pieces of information from police
to be disclosed under S.17 by the CCRC and even now the CCRC are unable to
locate original documents using their powers under S.17 because they have been ‘mislaid’
by Essex police.
Discovering
what the actual truth was has taught me a very valuable lesson. Most of all I
have never doubted that justice would prevail no matter what: you never know
what’s around the next corner. I feel for Kevin Nunn and all of his supporter’s
but the truth will find a way to reveal itself large and so long as you stay
strong on your path when a corner comes along the trick is to ensure that you
look around every one because around that next bend may be the answer you’ve
been looking for.
Do I think
disclosure should be automatic on request? No, I don’t, but the hurdle that
needs to be jumped should be set very low. In my case it shouldn’t have been
necessary for me to wait almost 30 years for the true facts to be discovered by
piecing together documents—that seems a long time.
“Wrong doing can
only be avoided if those who are not wronged feel the same indignation at it as
those who are.”
Jeremy.
For more
views on the ruling see:
