IT'S
A DELIBERATE AGENDA - As part of the UK government’s requirement to reform public bodies, all government departments must conduct a Tailored Review of their arm’s length bodies at least once in the lifetime of a parliament, every 5 years.
As with all Tailored Reviews, the review of the Criminal Cases Review Commission
(CCRC) should have examined whether there is a continuing need for the function and form of the organisation.
If it is agreed that the organisation should be retained, the review will assess the body’s capacity for delivering more effectively and efficiently, and
should have includes an assessment of their performance. Then how do we
have the Mailkson case, and others? Is it more of the same British
Bullshit we have come to expect under the Conservatives?
THE
GUARDIAN 18 JULY 2024 - FOR MANY ANDREW MALKINSON'S CASE IS A SIGN THE CCRC
HAS LOST ITS WAY
Those close to
Criminal Cases Review Commission’s work hope review will pave way for change in leadership and purpose.
Andrew Malkinson had only just stepped outside the court of appeal last summer when he received a message of apology from Greater Manchester police. It was the force’s work that ultimately led to his wrongful conviction for
rape, leaving him incarcerated for 17 years.
Malkinson was unimpressed by their late contrition, but there was another body that refused to apologise at all that day. Yet their work – or lack of it – prolonged his time behind bars by a decade.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission twice prevented Malkinson’s case being considered again by the court, even though it knew from 2009 that DNA implicated another then unknown man. It also declined to do further forensic testing and never once looked at the original police file.
These facts were known to its chair, Helen Pitcher, when Malkinson was exonerated last summer, but it took her another nine months before an apology came. Conceding that the commission had “failed” him, Pitcher said she had not been able to say sorry before seeing the
findings of an independent review of its handling of his case.
Now that review by Chris Henley KC is finally in the public domain – and it makes for uncomfortable reading for the CCRC.
Henley’s report shows in excruciating detail the many mistakes made by those tasked with considering his case over three separate applications. Perhaps the most damning insight is how close they came to rejecting his application in 2022, despite new evidence, had an alternative suspect not been found.
Pitcher is now very unlikely to survive the crisis. The new justice secretary,
Shabana
Mahmood, said on Thursday Pitcher was “unfit to fulfil her duties as chair” and that she had begun the process to seek her removal.
In the weeks after Malkinson was cleared, when questions were being asked about her leadership,
the Guardian revealed that Pitcher was in
Montenegro promoting her property
business [Adriatic
Sea]. The Montenegro property directorship is one of at least eight jobs that Pitcher holds in addition to chairing the CCRC, including being a non-executive director of United Biscuits. She also chairs the judicial appointments commission, which many have said could be a conflict of interest, given the CCRC’s role in holding the appeal court to account.
RIGHTS
CHAMPION - Chris Henley KC is part of all that is good within the British criminal justice system.
According to the Mountford Chambers website, Chris Henley KC is one of the busiest criminal silks in the country, highly regarded in all areas of serious crime, particularly murder, fraud and terrorism. His work ethic, total commitment, empathetic and tenacious approach to all his cases has marked him out from his earliest years in practice.
He has appeared in many leading cases over the years including the 21/7 terror attacks, the Damilola Taylor trial, the Daniel Morgan murder trial, the Jemma Beale trial, the ‘Babes in the Wood’ perjury trial and many cases prosecuted by the SFO. He acted for the Trustees of the Didsbury Mosque/Manchester Islamic Centre at the Manchester Arena Inquiry.
Chris is a highly effective, intelligent advocate, with a confident, assured manner. He gets to grips with the most complex cases very rapidly, distilling the key issues and offering strategic advice at an early stage, often pre-charge. He is approached to appear at inquests, professional disciplinary hearings, and to provide advice to individuals facing a very wide range of criminal allegations. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has engaged him to lead the review of the Andrew Malkinson case.
In 2018/2019 he was chosen by criminal barristers across the country to lead the Criminal Bar Association during one of the most challenging periods in the profession’s history, achieving the first fee rises for defence and prosecution advocates for 20 years, and securing the Government’s commitment to the Bellamy Review of Criminal Legal Aid (CLAR) which ultimately resulted in further increases to fees of 15%.
But as a part-time chair, Pitcher is not the only member of the leadership team who will now face scrutiny. Many of those closest to the
CCRC’s work believe that Malkinson’s case is a symptom of a body that has lost its way. They hope that this review could pave the way for a change in leadership and purpose – as well as better funding.
The former solicitor general and Conservative peer, Lord Garnier, said: “Clearly, the Malkinson case has woken up a lot of people from outside the criminal justice world to the existence of the CCRC and what it does and what it has all too frequently failed to do.”
Garnier, who co-chaired a Westminster Commission into the CCRC, said he hoped for radical changes to the organisation.
“I think it needs new leadership. I think it needs less timid leadership, I think it needs more full-time staff as opposed to fee-based staff who take on a case or deal with work on a day rate. Before, they had people on salaries with pensions who, I suggest, had a longer corporate memory of what had happened in the past.”
The CCRC was established in 1997 to replace a system where only the home secretary could sign off referrals back to the appeal court, a situation blamed for notorious wrongful convictions such as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, which languished for so long without prospect of justice.
LORD
GARNIER - Is
not one of the authors of the Report into Andrew Malikson's case. But
has commented on the failings with a view to overhauling the at present
broken safety net.
Lord
Garnier was instructed by Herbert Smith Freehills, in September 2019 Edward led Tom Cleaver of Blackstone Chambers and Anna Hoffmann of 4 Pump Court in the Divisional and Supreme Courts in the intervention by former Prime Minister
Sir John Major on the prorogation case: R (on the application of Miller) v The Prime Minister [2019] UKSC 41 against the
former Prime Minister, Boris
Johnson. In this case the Supreme Court held unanimously that the prorogation of Parliament in September 2019 had been unlawful, null and void, overturning the decision of the Divisional Court which had refused jurisdiction on the ground that the matter was political and not susceptible to judicial review.
Edward Garnier KC is a highly experienced silk in England & Wales and Northern Ireland.
His practice includes corporate advisory and financial services work, corporate crime and international human rights as well as defamation, privacy, confidence, malicious falsehood, contempt and related media law cases. His extensive experience in practice is underpinned by a parallel career in politics and as one of the Government’s two Law Officers: he served as an MP from 1992 until 2017 and was HM Solicitor General from 2010 to 2012. He is now in the
House of
Lords.
Edward advises and acts for companies and individuals whose rights have been adversely affected by foreign governments and agencies, including, for example, by asset seizures, imprisonment, extradition applications and Interpol Red Notices, as well as for overseas governments and agencies who are seeking to comply with international standards and the rule of law. He is regularly consulted by NGOs and charitable organisations.
When in Government as Solicitor General, he developed and introduced into this jurisdiction from the
United States the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, a means of dealing with companies who admit their offending to supplement prosecutions against individuals suspected of economic crime. He appeared for the Serious Fraud Office in two of the DPAs so far approved by the Court, the first one, Standard Bank, in 2014, and the then-largest, Rolls-Royce, in 2017. In 2020-21 he led the legal team acting for two respondent companies in the 11th and 12th DPAs to be approved by the Court.
For it to fulfil its role it needs to prove it is investigating and uncovering injustice as well as referring cases back for appeal when evidence is presented to it.
One of the more damaging details is that in all three of Malkinson’s applications, which spanned more than a decade, commissioners failed to request the original police file, resulting in little scrutiny beyond the prosecution version accepted in court.
It was Malkinson’s team at the charity Appeal who uncovered the undisclosed criminal past of key identification witnesses, discovering that one was a long-term heroin addict who came forward to help only when he was arrested for another crime.
David Jessel, who spent 10 years as a commissioner at the CCRC until 2010, was concerned about the repeated lack of scrutiny of the original file. “It’s crazy really, because the court paperwork file is just an explanation of why the person is guilty. You’ve got to dig deeper if there’s a sniff of a miscarriage – otherwise you’ll get nowhere.”
Jessel believes it is one of several signs that the CCRC has lost its way. “I think absent is the critical mass of curiosity, authority, experience and expertise represented in the early days of the CCRC’s full-time commissioners working with and inspiring a staff recruited for their ambition for justice.”
CRIMINAL
NEGLIGENCE = PROCEEDS OF CRIME - Never
mind an apology. What about prosecuting her for grabbing her
remuneration and not doing her job. Is this criminal negligence, and
should Helen Pitcher be made to give back the money she earned while
actually tending to her other investments overseas, at the expense of
the British taxpayer, and more importantly, taking seventeen from the
life of Andrew Malikson.
COMMENT:
The
Criminal Cases Review Commission is supposed to be the safety net for
British justice, but many see the inability of the Commissioners to
remain impartial and work with the evidence and not stray from the
tenets of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in terms of fairness and decency, and
not hide what the state wants to keep from the unsuspecting public, as
one of the things that is wrong with Britain and is dragging us down as
a society into a cauldron of political liars and civil service cheats,
leaching enhanced pensions from good honest workers.
Our
police forces are already corrupt
beyond belief according to reports commissioned by Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth (RIP), who was obviously swimming upstream against a tide of double standards, where
the law enforcers routinely abuse the rights of the accused, takes
bribes and lose inconvenient evidence. Who then is the criminal? Is this
what King
Charles wants? In the past, the Prime
Minister and contenders for other prestigious Cabinet posts were likely
to duck and dive rather than work to clean up our law enforcement
junkies. What then of Sir
Kier Starmer, a qualified barrister, and his justice ministers and
Secretaries of State. Many of which are also legally qualified.
HIDDEN
AGENDAS
It appears that the agenda of the Crown Prosecution Service and Criminal Cases Review
Commission is to back up local police no matter how corrupt
they might be and ensure that a person serves his or her term regardless
of proof of innocence that may be staring them in the face. The object
is to keep their victim (dissenters) on a very short leash, to prevent
any activist from being believed, or from challenging the system
further.
In
very similar terms to the Horizon
Post Office scandal, the present system is a closed loop, where
complaints are referred back to the right's abusers, for them to write
their own letter of exoneration. As per Sussex
police and Wealden in
the 1997 Petition. A matter that is still unresolved.
This
reminds us of the Potty
Training case where despite the state being unable to force removal
of toilets because they are a Health & Safety requirement, that Dame
Butler-Sloss still ordered removal and only then said that the
appellant in the case (his landlord) could reinstate them to comply with
the 1992 Regulations.
You cannot get much more ridiculous than that. But Britain as the head
of the Commonwealth
left over from our Colonial days, is being controlled by such bungling
hypocrites. Hardly wonder then that our economy is in tatters.
The
other agenda is to protect the integrity of the state and not reveal
papers that would show those convicted were in fact stitched up by the
state, let alone that King
Edward was a Nazi sympathizer before he abdicated.
All water under the bridge maybe, but useful background, like the
alleged German ancestry of the Windsor family.
As
with many others, in
our opinion the CCRC and their Commissioners are not fit for purpose.
They are mates of former colleagues within the criminal justice system.
They are not independent and they openly discriminate between near
identical cases involving the same bogus science used to convict. They do not exist as they are at present, to represent the electorate and
in no way can they be described as working transparently where the above holds
true. They are simply a shadow of their former positions, helping out
their old chums.
All of which underscores the lack of an Article
13 remedy in our domestic Human
Rights Act 1998. A situation engineered by British civil servant
policies, working with certain Members of Parliament to enslave the
electorate.
LINKS
& REFERENCE
https://www.4pumpcourt.com/barrister/lord-garnier-kc/
https://www.theguardian.com/law/article/2024/jul/18/for-many-andrew-malkinsons-case-a-sign-the-ccrc-has-lost-its-way
https://www.4pumpcourt.com/barrister/lord-garnier-kc/
https://www.theguardian.com/law/article/2024/jul/18/for-many-andrew-malkinsons-case-a-sign-the-ccrc-has-lost-its-way
HIVE
OF CORRUPTION -
These are the offices in Hailsham where your taxes
are converted to planning consents for friends of the civil servants who
rule the roost. The Sussex police will never investigate their chums whp
are paying for the force to help them do all they can to ruin members of the public who make waves.
This
is possible because the police forces in Britain are not accountable to
anyone. Ms Katy
Bourne was appointed to change that but appears to have fallen in
with Giles York and his underlings to re-work the system to keep things
as they were. We are sure that Parliament
will not be amused.