Jeremy Bamber
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) normally claims that 85% of cases are reviewed in less than a year; however it is now three years since Jeremy Bamber Innocent Campaign (JBIC) made a submission to the CCRC and there appears to have been little progress made. JBIC recently said that the CCRC has only completed the examination of two of the ten grounds submitted to them in 2021.
Of the two issues said to have been adjudged and completed by the CCRC, have they accepted or rejected either or both? If there are ten issues being adjudicated, how many have to be regarded as ‘valid’ for the case to be referred back to the Court of Appeal?
The problem with analysing the White House Farm murders case is that there is a huge discrepancy between what the prosecution alleged, and the facts as revealed by diligent research. Time and again, when considering the police case I found myself concluding that the police evidence was factually incorrect but accepted by the Court. I have researched the Bamber case for around 15 years in total and it is no exaggeration to say that the prosecution case was essentially a total work of fiction. Somebody, particularly Acting Detective Chief Superintendent Michael Ainsley, decided that there was no falsehood so outrageous that it couldn’t be used in evidence to convict Jeremy Bamber.[i] Anyone who thinks that they understand the case by watching dramatized TV programmes or by reading the various books published on the case has no idea really what happened.
However, I question if it really assists Jeremy Bamber to ask the CCRC to examine every aspect of the evidence fabrication. It soon becomes evident when comparing the facts of the case to what the prosecution outlined that the police case relied heavily on fabricated evidence; by 2017 a 1000 page meticulously researched document was in existence highlighting hundreds of factual discrepancies in the case, many of which have been featured on the CCRC Watch website and it appears that the March 2021 submission to the CCRC was based upon this research. But, is the CCRC the right organisation to ask to plough through all of the materials? I strongly suggest not, given how long the process is taking.
Consider what the CCRC actually do; for a start, they don’t investigate, they peruse documents looking for information that supports previous decisions made by the Courts. So, the applicant submits a thousand pages of documentation to the CCRC which states that almost everything said at Trial and the Appeal was factually incorrect. The submission alleges numerous examples of alleged perjury and falsified evidence. What is the CCRC going to do with such allegations? I submit that the CCRC will try to find a way to disallow the suggestions of wrongdoing and has many years’ experience of stonewalling. Rather than investigate the truth of the allegations the CCRC will seek statements made in Court and at the Appeal that negate or raise doubts about the fresh materials.
No stone is left unturned by the CCRC, they even stoop to cite confidential discussions between Jeremy Bamber and his lawyers when giving reasons to rejecting his points. Thus, for example, when Jeremy Bamber made the entirely reasonable suggestion (now demonstrably true) to his lawyers that blood could have been ‘planted’ inside a silencer[ii] the CCRC used the reaction of one of his lawyers (who said it sounded far-fetched) to justify taking the suggestion no further. In other words, they won’t investigate the suggestion that blood was planted in the silencer because his own defence lawyer ridiculed the idea.
Getting the CCRC to actually investigate anything is like trying to get water to flow uphill, and the current submissions to the CCRC are asking them to repeat that exercise hundreds of times.
To give just one example, there is now a handwritten note that suggests very strongly that Jeremy Bamber stated truthfully that he telephoned the police at 03:36 am. Up until 2021, the CCRC could say that this was in dispute, and even go as far as to say that his trial accepted that the time of the phone call had to be 03:26; the Judge had declared this to be so. But the Judge was wrong.
In 2019, a scrap of notepaper was discovered and without exaggeration, the case against Jeremy Bamber collapsed.
PC West telephoned Witham Police Station at 03:37
The information in the scrap of paper reproduced above destroys the entire police case against Jeremy Bamber because it shows that PC Myall (based at Witham) received a telephone call from PC West at 03:37, who was in the control room at Chelmsford Police Station. It confirms that PC West was telling the truth when he said at the trial that Jeremy Bamber telephoned him at 03:36. West said that he called Witham about a minute after Jeremy Bamber telephoned him. It also indicates firmly that the phone call received by PC West at 03:26 must have been from Nevill Bamber, who Jeremy Bamber could not have murdered, and, knowing that Nevill Bamber was found dead at 07:30, someone inside White House Farm had to have killed him while Jeremy Bamber was stood outside surrounded by police officers. All of which indicates that Sheila Caffell was the killer.
In the 2021 submissions to the CCRC there are literally hundreds of items of evidence similar to that outlined above; irrefutable evidence that the testimony given at trial by various police officers was incorrect. How does the CCRC deal with such evidence? We shall have to wait and see. However, having been given the evidence, surely the referral can go ahead without further delay? What else is there for the Court of Appeal to consider other than two persons said to have been murdered by Jeremy Bamber were alive at 03:26?!
What have JBIC said about the 2021 submission?
Latest News 06.06.22[iii](sic)
"On 10th March 2021, Jeremy’s legal team lodged eight submissions with the CCRC. Two additional submissions were made before Christmas (2021) on new evidence we discovered after the initial application had been made.
During April this year (2022), the CCRC advised Jeremy’s legal team that Andrew Timney, the Case Review Manager who was allocated to review the submissions, is leaving the CCRC. Correspondence from Timney since October 2021 does not indicate that he has undertaken any substantive review of the evidence submitted. Timney has advised us that he has made preservation order requests with a number of bodies including Essex Police which should protect vital case documents.
The time it has taken the CCRC to date to address what are compelling submissions is very disappointing to say the least. However, we are now pleased to confirm that a new, senior Case Review Manager has now been allocated to take over the review. The CCRC have set out that a thorough hand over of the case is taking place and should be complete within the next few weeks.
We are hopeful that the new Case Manager will dedicate his time to reviewing Jeremy’s application as a priority, and that the submissions will then receive the full attention they warrant.
We will update you further as things progress."
Despite the promise, there has been no further update since June 2022. Note that between March 2021 and June 2022 the Case Review Manager, Andrew Timney, had done virtually no work on the submission. What kind of management allows a caseworker to do almost no work on a submission for 15 months?
When Jeremy Bamber’s latest submission was made to the CCRC on 11 March 2021 his legal advisor, Mark Newby commented:
“This has been a journey that has never forgotten that at the centre of it is a family tragedy and one that still affects all the participants today including Jeremy Bamber. But it has also been astonishing in terms of the picture that is now uncovered and how far away from the original trial narrative this case now presented to the commission is...The audit trail now uncovered raises very serious questions over withheld evidence, misleading of the jury, interference with the crime scene, the movement of key evidence, altered phone records and admitted destruction of original exhibits" (my emphasis).
For certain there was a huge amount of malfeasance in the way that the case was prosecuted. But why not ask the CCRC to concentrate on issues that impact directly on the supposedly crucial points highlighted by the Judge at Trial? The contradictory and puzzling statements by JBIC throw into doubt whether Jeremy Bamber might achieve an appeal this decade at the current rate of progress. The point being that there is sufficient evidence already available to the CCRC to refer the case immediately if they chose to do so.
It will soon be forty years since the White House Farm (WHF) murders occurred. For almost forty years Jeremy Bamber has stated that he is innocent and did not kill five members of his family. His protestations have met with disbelief and at times considerable revulsion and derision from the CCRC, who have spent around 13 years in total considering the various submissions made by his representatives.
There seems to be a tendency for allegedly innocent people to fixate on every aspect of evidence given at their trial; to want every piece of evidence to be re-examined however minor it may seem. It has been suggested that Jeremy Bamber is on a crusade to demonstrate not just that he didn’t kill his family, but that multiple witnesses lied, and a vast conspiracy placed him in prison. Even if that is the case, it doesn’t bode well for his submission to the CCRC, which as outlined above, is not inclined to look favourably on such allegations. Would it have been better, perhaps, to have selected just one or two of the more important aspects of evidence to be examined by the CCRC and left everything else to be published in a book after Bamber is released?
Jeremy Bamber is not alone in experiencing the reluctance of the CCRC to investigate in-depth allegations of corruption in evidence given in Court. Robin Garbutt and Clive Freeman are going through a similar experience. The problem is that so much of the evidence given in their cases is found to be ‘wrong’. Often, this relates to evidence that was not available at the trial and has only been discovered years after the verdict.
The CCRC, as we saw with the case of Andrew Malkinson, can disregard fresh evidence even when it suggests that someone is innocent. The CCRC does not seem equipped to cope with a suggestion that a huge proportion of evidence given at trial is incorrect and appears to do everything in their power to negate suggestions that evidence is unreliable.
By Bill Robertson
Bill Robertson has researched alleged miscarriages of justice for around 20 years and advised on several cases, including the most recent application to the CCRC by Jeremy Bamber.
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References
[i] https://empowerinnocent.wixsite.com/ccrcwatch/post/retired-detective-superintendent-michael-ainsley-has-died-ccrc-must-not-let-justice-die-with-him