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MOJUK: Newsletter ‘Inside Out’ 74 ====================== Statement Of Anthony Nolan I am Anthony Nolan aged 42. On the 4 July 1998,1 was arrested and subsequently charged with murder. I was alleged to have shot and killed a Patrick Delaney in Kentish Town, London.Mr Delaney was shot and killed in broad daylight which was witnessed by several people. At police interviews, I responded to all questions with "no comment." and made no statement. At the time of the murder, I was with my mother in her house which was close to the killing of Delaney. Following my arrest, I later agreed to attend an identification parade, I had nothing to hide and didn't believe that it was me who could be selected as the person responsible. Whilst I knew Mr Delaney, I also knew the person whom Mr Delaney was with at the time. This other person a Gideon Tsagne was to tell the police that it was me who was responsible for the murder. However, at the time of my arrest, I didn't know those details. At the identification parade, two witnesses who saw the whole series of events did not select me as the person responsible. Another person, an elderly woman aged 70 having walked along the parade, approached the officer in charge and said "the best I could say is near number seven" which was the position I was stood in. The officer did not ask her to clarify that but merely turned and said, "the witness has made a positive identification of number seven." I was dumfounded. Mr Tasagne did not attend the parade. Later, whilst I was on remand in Belmarsh prison, Mr Tsagne was himself shot and killed. Police evidence was that it was with the same gun that had been used to shoot and kill Mr Delaney. At my trial, Mr Tsagne's statement was read out in court although my defence team sought to have it excluded. The elderly woman who was called to give evidence had difficulty in as much as seeing me in the dock, never mind seeing the lawyers closest to her but went on to point me out as the person she allegedly saw shoot and kill Mr Delaney. Things might have seemed to have improved when evidence was given that this woman had originally told police that she had only seen the back of the gunman as he made his escape, that she hadn't seen his face. What on earth were the police thinking in allowing such a person, given what she had told them to allow her to attend an identification parade unless she was to try and identify the face of the alleged killer on the basis of the killer's back which is illogical and nonsense. This ought to have been fully exploited by counsel and indeed to have sought to have her excluded from giving evidence as what she was saying was such a contradiction of her earlier description that the judge himself ought to have excluded her evidence and at the least warned the jury in no uncertain terms to be cautious. He did neither. I was later convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment and given a tariff of 20 years. There was no forensic evidence against me, no admissions by me and no statements from me. The BBC's Rough Justice took up my case and instructed a QC who prepared grounds of appeal and indeed later argued them at the Court of Appeal. The appeal hinged on the way the identification parade was conducted and the breaches of PACE which should have allowed my solicitor and myself to have been informed of the limit of the elderly woman's identification evidence. Something was clearly wrong that one minute she only saw the back of the killer, then goes on to say "near number seven" at that parade which again is not an identification. The procedures under PACE were clearly flawed but the Court of Appeal rejected my appeal. They did however allow leave to take the appeal to the House of Lords on a point of law which their Appeal's Committee later rejected without giving any reason as to their decision. Interestingly, the judges at the Court of Appeal stated that on the question of whether I had had a fair trial or my counsel were incompetent were issues they were not prepared to give a decision on. My counsel had argued that I had not received a fair trial. This is a remarkable statement to make, for is not the function of judges one of making decisions? Unfortunately, my QC did not I believe argue as he should have done on the issues of a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights but confined his arguments about the identification parade and PACE. Rough Justice were to drop me after my appeal, no doubt because my case no longer had any interest for them, the appeal had failed and the killer of Tsagne was still on the loose and I remained convicted of Delaney's murder. Whilst in prison, my mother died and here again I have had problems, this time from the Prison Service who in granting me permission to attend the mass and later hr funeral led me through the procedures so late on the day that there was no realistic chance of me attending either. Having been put in a taxi with 2 prison officers, I was left waiting at the exit from the prison for almost an hour. The funeral was being held just 5 miles away. Now I knew that I would miss the funeral and even if I did go, it would all be over with and my family would have left This was tantamount to refusing me my wish to attend the funeral. I have been accused by prison psychologists in a report of "acting the victim," which I find insulting and offensive and disregards the mourning and grieving process. Such people are a disgrace but then I am aware that they are theory bound and practice a science fiction no doubt because they couldn't make it in the real sciences of the caring profession like medicine. Everything they do is theory and guesswork and they have become the so called 'experts' on how people think and act, although they are short on ideas on how people feel. My fight continues and now I am in the process of lodging an application under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights at the ECHR, that my right to a fair trial was violated.My submission will only be on Article 6, though several of my rights under ECHR have been violated. The British Justice system has failed me in its quest for a conviction. Since my conviction the BBC have run a feature on unsolved murders which included Gideon Tsagne, the witness shot and killed whilst I was in prison. His murder has been attributed amongst other things to drugs and Yardies both of which I have no history of being associated with. One explanation may be the fact that I am of Irish origin and we know how the Irish community have in the past suffered at the hands of British injustice. In Struggle, Anthony Nolan ================================================ Prisoners mail, where does it all go to!- definitely not to the prisoners! A large amount of correspondence from MOJUK to the ‘Hostages’ and correspondence from ‘Hostages to MOJUK,never arrives. It certainly arrives at the prisons but doesn’t reach the ‘Hostages’ and vice-versa, mail given for posting by ‘Hostages’ doesn’t get sent. So does anyone know where all this missing mail is?? Prison Rule 35A (and Young Offender Institutions Rule 11) allows for a prisoner's correspondence to be intercepted where it is a necessary and proportionate response to what is sought to be achieved. In high security prisons, prisoner correspondence is screened by an x-ray machine when it arrives at the prison, and as a matter of good practice, correspondence will also be subject to drug detection by the prison drug dog. At lower security prisons, this will happen when there is intelligence to suggest there is an illicit article in a prisoner's mail, although some prisons screen all mail as a matter of good practice. Prisoners are aware that all letters are opened and can be read by staff, except correspondence that has the protection of Prison Rule 39, which protects legal professional privilege or contains confidential material. All correspondence involving a category A prisoner, or of prisoners held on a unit containing a category A prisoner, will be read. Prisoners who have committed or are remanded for particular offences (e.g. those who pose a threat to children) will have all their mail read, subject to review about the continuing threat that they pose. In all other cases, except where it has been decided that a prisoner's correspondence may provide useful intelligence for particular investigations, around five per cent. of all mail will be read on a random basis based on an assessment of the threat to security at individual establishments.A prisoner's mail will also be searched during a cell search, unless it is kept in stored property. ================================= Crime study casts doubt on prison as deterrent, By Ian Burrell Home The Independent Prison does not work, according to official figures to be released week show criminals are much more likely to commit further offences if they are sent to jail. New Home Office research - which flies in the face of the Government's crime-fighting strategy - shows that community-based sentences, such as graffiti cleaning, litter collecting, graveyard repairs and anger management courses, cut reoffending more effectively. Figures to be released to Parliament by the Home Office minister Hilary Benn will show that 44 per cent of criminals who are given community penalties are reconvicted within two years, compared with 56 per cent of those sent to jail. News of the findings led last night to calls for thousands of prisoners to be released from jails on electronic tags and transferred to more effective punishments. In a written parliamentary answer to Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, Mr Benn said the Home Office had re-evaluated community punishments. New "adjusted" figures show a wide gulf has emerged between the reconviction rates of those completing jail sentences in 1999 (55.7%) and those given non-custodial punishments (44.3 %). Information provided by the Home Office to the House of Commons in 2000 stated that between 1987-1996 there was never more than 3 per cent difference in the reconviction rates for the two approaches and that, at times, prison had been judged to be more effective in tackling recidivism. It stated categorically: "There is little difference between the reconviction rate for custody and all community penalties." Mr Hughes urged the Government to reconsider its position in the light of the latest research. "These figures put clear blue water between the custody and community options," he said. "This should be the signal for a major shift of funding from prisons to probation. There are thousands of prisoners who could be out on a tag, under supervision, paying back to the communities they took from." Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the probation union Napo, said the Government had failed properly to resource frontline probation staff. He said: "It flies in the face of economic sense. Probation is one-tenth of the cost of prison and we now know it is more effective in reducing offending." Deborah Clothier, chief executive of the Restorative Justice Consortium, said the Government needed to provide more information about the benefits of community penalties so that they would be more popular with sentencers. "People generally don't know about them," she said. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, have both spoken recently of the need to reduce the prison population. But penal reformers claim judges and magistrates have been afraid to use non-custodial sentences. |