Association of Prisoners Maintaining Innocence (APMI) Innocence Assembly 2026
The APMI’s Innocence Assembly took place at the offices of the APPEAL charity on London’s Red Lion Street on Saturday 19th September 2026.
The first to speak from the panel was Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, who explained that his focus was the ongoing IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentences scandal, along with with the no less controversial joint enterprise sentences. In the former, there were, and are, too many people locked up for stealing a mobile phone years ago, now so damaged by the insecure IPP experience that they’re unable to convince the parole board they’re safe to release. In the latter, too many young black males are still being locked up when they weren’t even in the area when the index offence was committed.
Veteran joint enterprise campaigner and JENGBa co-founder Gloria Morrison followed, describing how she once sued the Crown Prosecution Service over their not recording identity statistics, leading to them now having to, in order to understand which socio-economic groups were suffering under this law. Morrison said ‘the UK is the only country in Europe that gives life sentences to children’.
The APPEAL charity’s Emma Torr was next, saying the CCRC ‘aren’t fit for purpose’, and that the courts aren’t looking at fresh evidence, citing the case of Peter Sullivan, locked up for nearly 40 years for a crime he didn’t commit. APPEAL are famous for the Andy Malkinson exoneration, where they revealed Greater Manchester Police had sat on exonerating DNA evidence for about 12 years, and Torr said they’d worked on Malkinson’s case for 6 years before it was overturned.
Adding ‘not ALL police are corrupt’, Torr cited the new Trew’s Law initiative, which is a campaign to open all police files if they’ve been convicted of improper investigations, a la 70s corrupt cop Derek Ridgewell. Torr said that there were 20 policemen convicted each year - we must also ask how many of them are maintaining innocence? Everyone uses false allegations to screw over others, lest we forget.
Dr Lucy Welsh of the University of Sussex, a former defence barrister and author of the recent CCRC ‘users report’, said there isn’t enough known about the CCRC, and her work was now committed to ensuring more transparency in that.
APMI lead Danny Barrs said Malkinson and the Postmasters were ‘victims of the state’, while saying the ‘victim worship’ in the media had become all-consuming, ‘the people that are really “in denial” are the establishment and the media’ and that ‘someone maintaining innocence cannot be rehabilitated’.
There were plenty of questions from the gathered throng, from hardworking APMI secretary Sue Stephens to PMI Garry Malone, campaigner John Stokes and Barrs’ fellow APMI lead Iain MacMaster.
Your reporter had a chance to briefly plug new book Magnolia Graffiti, all about my own case, and it did the rounds of curious eyes on the 6th floor of Lion House.
Barrs’, MacMasters’ and Stephens’ passion in fighting for the rights of Prisoners Maintaining Innocence (its ‘Association’ replacing the ‘Progressing, as in PPMI, of original founder Dr Michael Naughton of Empowering The Innocent) is inspiring, even if the message is counter-narrative.
Cases like Sullivan, Malkinson, Lucy Letby and the Postmasters have led to a new Golden Age of miscarriages of justice in the media - but what will Andy Burnham’s new administration do about it?
By Sean Bw Parker
Magnolia Graffiti is available as Paperback or Ebook here: Magnolia Graffiti: Amazon.co.uk: Sean Bw Parker Books
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