Jeremy Bamber
My name is Jeremy Bamber, and I was remanded in custody to Norwich prison on 29 September 1985. I have remained in prison, an innocent man, ever since.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s my case was being reviewed by a department at the Home Office called ‘C3 Department’. When the CCRC came into being they inherited my case as a potential miscarriage of justice from this department. In 2001, my conviction was referred back to the Court of Appeal by the CCRC on new DNA evidence. After a 14 day appeal the judges rejected this DNA evidence, and I’ve remained in jail ever since.
In 2004, I reapplied to the CCRC with fresh evidence, and many fresh lines of enquiry, that I had hoped would be investigated by them.
My experience engaging with my original Case Review Manager had been a very good one. But, that same year, I was allocated a new Case Review Manager, and he flatly refused to accept that pretty much every aspect of the case against me was wrong, and that the evidence set out by the prosecution at trial was either misrepresented or fabricated.
Years into this second review, the Commission informed me that working on my case was a former Essex Police officer. They did not give us his name but assured us that he had no connection with the original investigation in 1985/6. That was true in the narrowest sense, but misleading.
We now know that this former police officer, an ex-Detective Chief Superintendent (DCS), had been in charge of Case 253 (88), in which four key prosecution witnesses against me at trial were allowed to avoid prosecution for fraud. Essex Police allowed them to escape prosecution, despite the strong evidence against them, so that their convictions could not be used by me as a ground of appeal.
The case file was disclosed to my QC after my 2002 appeal had ended. A quote from this case file (HOLMES 2 Doc. A49 58/17) stated:
‘Essex Police still felt sensitive about the whole case, our mistakes have been acknowledged, and if he [Robert Boutflour - a key prosecution witness and financial beneficiary of my conviction] felt his family were owed something by the force – that may be so, and indeed that was probably the reason for me [the ex DCS] being there personally.’
Why didn’t the CCRC prevent this ex-DCS from working on my submissions from 2004 to 2012? Why did they mislead me, and my lawyers, about the fact that he deliberately allowed this fraud investigation, begun in 1988, to drag on for many years, and for it then to be discontinued due to the length of time taken to investigate it? This is despite the clear evidence of wrongdoing by the prosecution witnesses. How convenient.
My current Senior Manager at the CCRC is an ex-policeman, who lied to my solicitor, and to me, about what my Case Review Manager had stated to me in various phone conversations. Months later, he admitted that my calls to the Commission were all recorded, and conceded that my Case Review Manager had said what I alleged he’d said all along.
So, it seems we really cannot trust ex-policemen, who often have strong incentives to lie in their job, to be working at the Commission, as they appear unable to resist the temptation to lie in their new role, even though all telephone calls are recorded. Of course, those recordings will be played in open court in due course. The prison has confirmed that all my calls to the CCRC had been recorded by the prison (I made them on the phone in my cell to ensure they were). I also kept contemporaneous notes from every call to the Commission, which verified they lied to me and my solicitor, which should be wrong, but it seems it’s not wrong at all, but standard practice.
It has, so far, taken 3 years for my Case Review Manager and his Manager to review 3 of the 10 grounds of appeal that we submitted to them 36 months ago. Astonishingly, it is only very recently that my Case Review Manager has read my submissions in full. He originally stated that, had he read my submissions in full at the beginning, that would have ‘blown his mind’. It was only after an official complaint to the Commission over what he had said to me that he was asked to read all ten grounds of appeal in full.
We have set out very clearly in our submissions where the evidence that proves my innocence is located, but the Commission has still not obtained this material because, if they had, I would have been granted fresh leave to appeal by now.
Since my original submissions, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have doubled down on not disclosing any further evidence to me, or anyone else, by concealing it behind a 70-plus year Official Secrets Act Order, and archiving this material at Kew, the Royal Archive. What possible justification can there be for this?
I’ve had to commission forensic work, such as photo analysis etc, myself. The Commission promised to pay me back for this photographic work. and they are recorded as stating this on many occasions. 13 years later, the Commission still owes me £9,944 for this work, and they say they will only reimburse me if they rely on this new photographic work as part of a new appeal referral. Changing the goal posts as they do so very often; changing them, it seems, whenever they like and always, always, always to their benefit, and never to mine (or for any other applicant’s).
Three years ago, we were promised regular updates on work done, disclosures obtained, forensic work commissioned etc, but only if we said nothing to the media about the submissions. For two years they didn’t even open my file, and in the year since, my Case Review Manager and his Commissioner have said almost nothing to me or my lawyers.
The few things that have been said, some have been blatant lies, provable lies, but the Commission believes, apparently, that is perfectly acceptable to lie to applicants and their solicitors. It’s part of the Commissions remit to keep everything secret, so they obfuscate, mislead or just lie to avoid saying anything helpful or useful to reassure us.
For example, at a Judicial Review application against the CPS for disclosure in 2018, which was ruled on in 2020, thirty-one documents and photographs were identified as capable, individually or as a whole, of proving my innocence. The Commission informed us last year that the CPS had disclosed 31 documents and photos to them. They, then, refused to list what these thirty-one pieces of evidence were and refused to disclose them to us. If the CPS had actually disclosed the material listed in the Judicial Review to the CCRC, and they had received this material, I would have had a new appeal granted by now.
I believe the CPS just sent thirty-one random, previously disclosed, documents and photographs to the Commission knowing that they would never know this was previously disclosed material that contained nothing. The Commission would then wrongly assume we were fishing and dismiss our application on that premise. The CPS has done this before, pretending to disclose new material, only for it to be the same documents disclosed again, not the unedited or hand-written originals that we had actually sought from them.
I was due a substantial update from the Commission on their progress by the end of March this year. I wasn’t hopeful for anything, based on my years of experience dealing with the CCRC and I was right. The update was a very brief ‘nothing to see here’, still reviewing and will update again in 3 months. They revealed themselves to be liars again, as I was previously told they were working through the thirty-one documents the CPS had supplied, which was cited as a reason for their delays. However, in their March update they seem to have forgotten they said that and advised us they’ve not even looked at them yet!
In conclusion, the Commission has been given powers to obtain anything they require to investigate potential miscarriages of justice. Even when this evidence is obtained and it is put right in front of them, as I have done repeatedly, they simply refuse to investigate and then create straw man arguments to justify their erroneous conclusions.
The CCRC is not fit for purpose, and I believe that ex-police officers deliberately sabotage investigations to protect their former colleagues, and that corruption of this kind is endemic in this organisation, carried out behind closed doors with no one holding them to account.
Why does this continue? Because it conceals all the failings in the Criminal Justice System that would embarrass the police, the CPS and Prosecuting Counsel who obtain convictions on evidence they know to be false, as they did, and continue to do, in my case.
Just look at the enquiry into the Post Office scandal. Even the Crown’s KC admitted recently at the enquiry to manipulating witness evidence to conceal the truth. That is not a surprise to those who say they are suffering a miscarriage of justice. The CPS, the police and Prosecuting Counsel do this all the time, certainly in my case. The Commission seems to turn a blind eye to this because they are, seemingly, there to prevent the real truth about how corrupt and broken our system of criminal justice is, because if the public knew it would, I think, shock them to the core.
I believe that the CCRC’s mantra has been taken from John Paul Sartre (1949): ‘Better yet I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully’, when it should be from Martin Luther King Jr: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’.
The Commission should know this to be so; but, instead, their errant ways leads me to my favourite quote of all: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil and injustice, is for good men and women to know and then do nothing.’
Let’s see what the CCRC does now.
By Jeremy Bamber