Robert Brown, HMP Haverigg, in the news again

"I have No Voice from Within these Prison Walls"

Robert Brown 895-839

HMP Haverigg

Millom

Cumbria

LA18 4NA

Roberts own story:
http://www.mojuk.org.uk/eddie/rob.html

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In Denial Of Murder (IDOM)

Robert Brown: It took five policemen 30 hours to break him down. The 19-year-old was threatened, intimidated and mocked, refused access to a lawyer, made to strip and shown a pair of unfamiliar, blood-soaked jeans which he was told proved his guilt.

The trial at Manchester Crown Court was, by all accounts, a farce, but the judge told the jury that to find in Brown's favour would be to accuse six policemen of lying.

    'This was before any of today's high-profile cases of police corruption,' said O'Neil. 'In 1977, it was incomprehensible that a policeman would lie on oath.'

    'For the Parole Board, being IDOM is the worst-ever category. It's a staggering injustice,' said Don Hale, the human rights campaigner whose battle against the authorities secured Downing's release. 'Prisoners with that label are considered more dangerous than someone who is genuinely guilty of murder.'

   'The Court of Appeal has an almost inbuilt bias in keeping people in prison,' said John McDonnell MP

  The CCRC was established in 1997 . . . . . . There is a widespread feeling, however, that it is thwarted by the Court of Appeal: of the 150 cases the CCRC has referred back to the Court of Appeal in the past five years, Foster estimates just over half have been heard, one third of which have been rejected.

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25 years in jail for denying that he's a killer

Robert Brown won't get parole - because he maintains his innocence of murder

Amelia Hill, The Observer, Sunday March 3, 2002

Margaret Brown is dying. Last week, allowed to see her for the first time in months, her son silently gazed at her shrunken form on the bed and moved forward. Then he stopped.

Turning to a policeman standing behind him, he asked the officer to move around the bed and raise his arm incongruously in the air: the steel chain attached to his handcuff was making it impossible for him to hug his mother.

Everybody laughed when the 'wanted' posters went up around Manchester's Bullring estate. It was January 1977 and it looked, Robert Brown said at the time, as if the police were searching for Rod Stewart.

Then he forgot about it and went back to his day-to-day life. The murder of 51-year-old Annie Walsh, battered to death in her home for no apparent reason, had horrified the neighbourhood but after four months and no police leads, people began to forget.

Until, that is, the May morning when the police beat down Brown's front door, hauled him out of bed, slapped his girlfriend and drove them both down to the police station.

It took five policemen 30 hours to break him down. The 19-year-old was threatened, intimidated and mocked, refused access to a lawyer, made to strip and shown a pair of unfamiliar, blood-soaked jeans which he was told proved his guilt.

'We all have a breaking point,' said Eamonn O'Neil, a campaigning television journalist who has been fighting for Brown's release for 11 years. 'By the end, he would have signed anything, which is exactly what he ended up doing.'

The trial at Manchester Crown Court was, by all accounts, a farce, but the judge told the jury that to find in Brown's favour would be to accuse six policemen of lying. 'This was before any of today's high-profile cases of police corruption,' said O'Neil. 'In 1977, it was incomprehensible that a policeman would lie on oath.'

The jury found Brown guilty and the judge sent him down for a minimum of 15 years. A quarter of a century later, however, Brown is still in jail. Now that Stephen Downing, imprisoned for 28 years for a murder he did not commit, has been released, Brown is the victim of Britain's longest-running alleged miscarriage of justice.

Brown, like Downing, has been classified by the Home Office as being IDOM, in denial of murder, and not even the impressive list of prison governors, guards and psychiatrists supporting his claims of innocence can win him parole.

'For the Parole Board, being IDOM is the worst-ever category. It's a staggering injustice,' said Don Hale, the human rights campaigner whose battle against the authorities secured Downing's release. 'Prisoners with that label are considered more dangerous than someone who is genuinely guilty of murder.'

Hale's book about his battle is the basis for the forthcoming BBC film In Denial Of Murder . 'When I contacted the Home Office about Stephen's case, their attitude was that he would be treated literally as scum and his file would stay at the bottom of the pile until he admitted his guilt,' he said. 'The whole thing was completely horrendous; by the end, the prison authorities were practically pleading with him to say he was guilty because they knew there was no way he was going to be let out as long as he kept maintaining his innocence.'

Downing's case hit the headlines but Hale, who receives hundreds of letters a month from prisoners insisting they too have been unjustly imprisoned, is adamant that Downing's case is far from unusual.

'There's a feeling that Stephen's case is exceptional; that he was innocent but most are not,' said Hale. 'That's patently untrue: we've seen a stream of innocent men released from jail over the last few years but the Home Office still refuses to admit the system gets it wrong.'

O'Neil agrees. 'Robert's is a lonely case but a distressingly typical one,' he said. 'It's a nightmare the rest of us simply can't imagine.'

After their initial appeal has been turned down, there are two ways lifers can get a sentence revoked: by the Parole Board and the Court of Appeal, via the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Brown, who is waiting to see whether the commission refers his case back to the Court of Appeal, is keeping his hopes in check: prisoners, campaigners, independent experts and even members of the boards all admit the system is not only loaded against those who refuse to accept guilt but that it punishes those who continue to insist on their innocence.

Between April and July last year, 22 per cent of those who maintained their innocence were granted parole compared with 46 per cent of all prisoners.

Jo Dobry, a member of the Parole Board, is adamant that there is no prejudice towards IDOMs. 'Those who claim to be innocent possibly do make life more difficult for us and it's true that we take as fact that prisoners have been rightly convicted,' she conceded. 'But the myth that we have a policy of not recommending the release of murderers who maintain their innocence is completely wrong.'

Kevin McNamara MP, a member of Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights, disagrees. 'The Parole Board may claim they do not penalise prisoners for insisting on their innocence but I believe that claim is disingenuous in the extreme,' he said. 'The IDOMs I meet repeatedly tell me of the pressure they are put under to admit guilt in order to progress through prison as quickly as possible.'

Those who resist, he says, suffer abuse and discrimination. 'The treatment received by those who refuse to give in needs to be looked at by the Home Affairs Committee or by the Joint Committee on Human Rights.'

His call is echoed by members of the Criminal Cases Review Commission itself. 'Whether the Parole Board claims it is the case or not, we have seen documents proving that people do see a conflict between getting parole and maintaining their protestations of innocence,' said Tony Foster, a member of the commission and former chief executive of ICI. 'There is no question that this is a state of affairs that is absolutely wrong.'

The CCRC was established in 1997 in the wake of the Birmingham Six case. While undeniably slow and despite arguments over the cases it chooses to consider - taking up cases where the prisoners have died, for example, before those where the claimants are still alive - most feel the commission is relatively efficient.

There is a widespread feeling, however, that it is thwarted by the Court of Appeal: of the 150 cases the CCRC has referred back to the Court of Appeal in the past five years, Foster estimates just over half have been heard, one third of which have been rejected.

'The Court of Appeal has an almost inbuilt bias in keeping people in prison,' said John McDonnell MP, a campaigner against miscarriages of justice. 'It's full of judges who are dyed-in-the-wool-types who err on the side of caution, demanding a standard of evidence that is almost impossibly high.'

For those like Brown, forced to choose between staying in prison while his mother fades away or admitting a heinous crime, the struggle can be overwhelming. As the police led him back to prison last week, he clutched a photo of the two of them together; the chain and handcuff still tugging on his wrist.