Dossier, The — Miscarriages of Justice in South Wales 1982-2016

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Wedi iddo ddioddef o gamweinyddu cyfiawnder mewn achos o lofruddiaeth yng Nghaerdydd, penderfynodd Michael O'Brien ymchwilio i achosion enwog ac amheus eraill yn ne Cymru dros gyfnod o ddeng mlynedd ar hugain. Dyma ganlyniad brawychus ei waith ymchwil i bymtheg o achosion, ac i weithgaredd Uned Camweinyddu Cyfiawnder Llu Heddlu De Cymru.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Michael O'Brien was a victim of a miscarriage of justice over a murder in Cardiff. He was driven to discover more about the many notorious and dubious convictions made in south Wales over a period of thirty years. This is the shocking result of his research into fifteen cases, and the Miscarriage of Justice Unit in the South Wales Police Force.

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Michael O’Brien was born and raised in Ely, Cardiff. He is the author of three books on the subject of false imprisonment, and the prison system in the UK, including his autobiography Death of Justice (2008), and Prisons Exposed (2013). O’Brien received the largest payout ever by the police to anyone wrongly convicted. After his release he set up MOJO (the Miscarriage of Justice Organisation) with Paddy Joe Hill (one of the Birmingham Six) and has worked extensively with Liberty. He has appeared regularly on national television and radio, and has been featured in The Observer, The Times; Sunday People; Daily Telegraph; New Statesman, and Daily Express. He will be appearing on Sky and Netflix in 2021 on the subject of miscarriages of justice. O’Brien has studied law and acts for young people as an appropriate adult in police stations. He also helps those who cannot get legal representation in the family courts as a Mackenzie Friend.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

All law enforcement and judicial systems are imperfect because humanity is imperfect. Everything we do is open to malicious abuse or inadvertent error. In a democracy, nonetheless, we hold the police and law courts to the highest standards and are justifiably outraged when abuses of the system are exposed. This is the subject of The Dossier , which examines fifteen miscarriages of justice in south Wales over a thirty-four-year period. The trial and imprisonment of what came to be known as the Cardiff Newsagent Three is given the most detailed examination (128 pages) with good reason because the author, Michael O’Brien, along with Ellis Sherwood and Darren Hall, was one of three who were wrongly accused and convicted of the brutal murder of Phillip Saunders in 1987. They were innocent, but spent over a decade in prison before their innocence was proved and they were released on appeal. Michael O’Brien’s examination of the events that led to his imprisonment is fascinating because we rarely get this level of detail about a police investigation. It is also shocking because the investigation was compromised from the beginning by the methods used by the Cardiff police, especially two detectives who O’Brien names, Don Carsley and Stuart Lewis. Michael O’Brien had not helped himself by being persuaded by his brother-in-law, Ellis Sherwood, to steal a car for a joyride in the vicinity of the murdered man’s home. The police operated a dragnet, pulling in everyone they could think of, eliminating them one by one, until they seemed to strike gold in Darren Hall, a petty criminal like Sherwood, who confessed to the murder under interrogation. The trouble is, Hall kept changing his testimony. He told his interrogators on several occasions that he was ‘schizophrenic’. Whether so or not, Hall was clearly mentally unbalanced and vulnerable to his interrogators’ bullying interviewing tactics. His testimony was worthless, yet it became one of the main planks in the prosecution’s case against the three and they were all found guilty. There was other suspect evidence. Stuart Lewis claimed to have overheard a conversation between two of the accused from their cells while on remand which implicated them in the murder, but that evidence was to say the least suspect. When Thames Valley Police were finally brought in to re-examine the case, prosecution evidence was torn apart and O’Brien, Sherwood and Hall were declared not guilty. One other case is given a similar degree of attention, the Welsh Conspiracy Trial of 1982-83. It was a time when holiday cottages were being burned and bombs were placed at several locations, and the police were desperate to make arrests. Stuart Lewis appears again, intimidating suspects, fabricating evidence, and even fabricating interviews. Suspects, including Adrian Stone, David Burns, and Robert Griffiths were threatened, denied access to a solicitor, interviewed for many hours at a time, and deprived of sleep. The officers involved would have done credit to the NKVD in Stalin’s Russia, the only difference being that the suspects were not afterwards taken down into the cellars and shot. Perhaps even more extraordinary, detectives tried to cajole the suspects into admitting that Dafydd Elis-Thomas was the mastermind behind the bombings. This either shows a remarkable ignorance of Welsh nationalist politics, or a deliberate attempt to smear Elis-Thomas, and with him Plaid Cymru, for political reasons. The book could have been better edited. In several places (page 157, line 1 for example) a sentence stops half-way so that its meaning is lost. This should not deter readers, however, because The Dossier is a cautionary reminder that innocent lives can be ruined by police corruption, with wrongful conviction as a consequence, and that we as a society need to be constantly vigilant in the pursuit of justice.