MOJUK: Newsletter �Inside Out� No 55

Appeal for Solidarity for Tommy Campbell

Hi Y'all

this is an urgent request for all on the MOJUK list to start writing to Tommy TC Campbell.

Tommy finds himself back in prison through no fault of his own, his next hearing bail won't be till the 2nd August. Miscarriages of Justice Organisation Scotland (MOJOS) are fearful that his licence is going to be revoked and are very annoyed by the media in Scotland, who have been vilifying Tommy over the last few days.

This is probably Tommy's darkest hour, after the magnificent struggle he has put up over the years to free himself and Joe Steele.

So please do put pen to paper, your writing to Tommy will make a difference, it doesn't have to be a letter, a post card is just as good.

Solidarity is now more important than it has ever been in the past, write to:

Tommy Campbell

13655

HMP Barlinnie

81 Lee Avenue

Riddrie

Glasgow

G33 2QX

Tommy Campbell, is once again a 'Hostage of the State'

Tommy TC Campbell has been sent back to jail. After a minor domestic situation on Saturday 7th July, where no offence was committed or complaint made, the police called at TC's house. He was sober, calm and cooperative. His wife has since freely admitted that she was drunk, aggressive and loud. Just one of the symptoms of the horrendous pressures placed on the families as well as the innocent accused.

The police asked that Tommy leave with them for "six hours cooling off". He happily agreed. When he hadn't returned home by the next morning his wife, Karen, attended the police station to be told he was being charged. She insisted that she had made no complaint, that the row had been her fault but to no avail. She returned four times over the weekend to repeat this statement - again to no avail.

On Sunday Tommy took ill in police cells. Pains to his chest and tingling in his arms. He was rushed to Stobbhill Hospital. Hospital staff were ordered by the police to�"tell no�one anything". It took hours of advocacy by myself to persuade them that his wife had the right to know how he was. They eventually�cooperated and were extremely helpful.

Tommy's health improved in spite of the police around his hospital bed.

At no time was his wife advised of what Tommy had been charged with. She was also told that he had not requested the presence of a lawyer -�this is not TC�Campbell, the great fighter for rights. Anyone who knows him knows the police have lied.��

Eventually on Sunday night his lawyer managed to find out that Tommy had been charged with serious assault (though none took�place) and carrying an offensive weapon. This last aspect refers to a�small knife that was in Tommy's�jacket pocket. But he only put that jacket on at the suggestion of the police that he left the house for a "cooling off period".�

At Glasgow Sheriff Court today, the Crown opposed bail on the basis of Tommy's record back�in the 1970s. Thirty years ago. In spite of a considered appeal by Tommy's lawyer, John Carroll,including Karen's insistence that no assault had taken place, that the knife had left the house as part of the police directions - the Sheriff decided on custody pending trial on 16th August.�

Now the Crown have all the grounds they need to ask for Tommy to be returned to jail pending his appeal unlikely to be convened till next year.�A cruel blow. An unnecessary restriction. Whether they will or not we will have to wait and see.

The family are worried for Tommy's health. The struggle against the police state to prove his innocence for 18 years has taken its toll on a strong man.��

All for what? A spat between a man and wife who have been living under intolerable strain for years yet are expected to cope with less help and support than any other former prisoner and his family. But Karen and Tommy Campbell have been punished not helped. By accident? I doubt it - don't you.

Reg McKay: Co author With TC, of �Indictment - Trial by Fire�

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Freedom & Justice for Samar & Jawad

We are pleased that, in a unanimous decision, the Law Lords (ie the Appeal Committee of the House of Lords) have provisionally accepted Samar & Jawad's "petition" or application to appeal against the Court of Appeal's dismissal of their case.

What happens now is that the prosecution are given 14 days to respond as to why leave should not be granted. Once the prosecution's point of view is received by their Lordships, they will decide whether to grant or refuse the appeal. If the views are not unanimous, then there will be a public hearing to hear arguments by both sides. If leave is granted, the full appeal will be listed to take place, and this can take months. If leave is refused, Samar & Jawad will then take their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which will take even longer.

But at least Samar & Jawad have now a milestone with which to mark their 7th summer in prison.

End the cover up! Quash the convictions! Free Samar & Jawad!

Samar has now been moved to HMP Send a Cat 'C' prison.

Samar Alami

HMP Send, Ripley Road, Woking, Surrey, GU23 7LJ

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Justice for Barry George

To all those who oppose wrongful convictions,

I am Michelle, sister of Barry George and, as you are probable aware, he was recently convicted for the murder of Jill Dando. Barry's family and friends are convinced of his innocence and are strongly campaigning to have this conviction overturned.

His appeal against this Miscarriage of Justice will be heard in the Court of Appeal on the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th of July 2002. Barry has asked me to contact any persons/organisations with experience in the field of Miscarriages of Justice, and to this end I write to ask if you can offer support to Barry at this time.

There has been a concerted effort on the part of some of the media to actively campaign against Barry, even though he was convicted on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Lies and innuendo have dogged him. None of which had anything to do with the crime he is convicted of.

Barry needs all the support we can give him, otherwise he could well spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit. Barry will never qualify for parole because he can never say he is guilty of this crime, therefore he cannot be repentant.

As the date of Barry George's appeal draws nearer, we, Barry's family and friends, wish to reiterate our confidence in Barry's innocence and unwavering support for him at this time.

The main thrust and focus of the appeal is identification. This point has implications for every case in the future where identification is in issue. The Prosecution and police in Barry's case have sought to turn non-identifications into positive identifications, thus turning totally negative evidence into positive evidence. The appeal will deal with this approach by the Prosecution conflicting with the background-of safeguards provided by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 procedures for parades; and the Codes of Practice governing them.

Further, we would like to take this opportunity to address the issue of the alleged taped confessions, recently referred to in the media.

It is our understanding that the Crown, after analysing these tapes,_does not intend to rely on them at the appeal in any way, shape or form.

We have never accepted there was any truth to these alleged confessions. They form part of a campaign to discredit Barry and to force a change in public opinion. The media have printed numerous articles about Barry designed to add force and credence to a murder conviction. These stories are totally unrelated to the trial and, we believe, are being used to shore up the weaknesses in this case and its lack of evidence against Barry.

The second focus of the appeal will be the scientific evidence; and the question of the requisite quality and provenance of such evidence before it can properly go before a jury. It will deal with the issues of contamination and that the police procedures in this case have led to the integrity of the vital exhibit, the coat being corrupted.

Barry's conviction is a miscarriage of justice, one of many we have seen recently, and we look forward to the day that his conviction will be overturned and his liberty restored.

Michelle Diskin

46 Church View

Ballincollig

Co. Cork

Ireland

00353 21 4872810

Miscarriages of Justice Organisation - the Appeal of Barry George

The Appeal of Barry George, convicted last July of the murder of TV Presenter Jill Dando, will be heard on Monday July 15th, in Court 4 at Royal Courts of Justice. The Lord Chief Justice will preside over the Appeal proceedings.

MOJO has grave concerns over the safety of the conviction of Mr. George, having supported Barry and his family throughout the trial process and through to this Appeal.

Mr. Georges defence team, led by Michael Mansfield QC will challenge the identification and scientific evidence which was presented by the Crown at the trial.

The prosecution sought to turn non-identifications into positive identifications thereby turning totally negative evidence into positive evidence - an approach which conflicts with the background of the safeguards of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act procedures for identification parades, and the Codes of Practice governing them.

This will be an important principle for future cases where similar identification evidence becomes an issue. An important fact to bear in mind is always the inherent danger that this type of evidence greatly increases the real risk of a miscarriage of justice.

Similarly, the appeal will look closely at the scientific issues and question the provenance of such evidence going before a jury. Contamination, police exhibit procedures and the integrity of the vital exhibit will be re-examined.

This Appeal will reveal the pollution of justice that has occurred in this case and will demonstrate the exceptional efforts that have been made to identify them. Anyone who has a genuine interest in the administration of fair justice should follow the Appeal closely. There are lessons to be learned, MOJO has been educated and we consider we have been privileged to be able to offer our service and support to Mr. George, his family and the defence team.

As with all similar cases, our thoughts must also lie at this time, with the family of Jill Dando for whom these proceedings will be a painful reminder of their tragic loss. "Justice for Jill" is important to everyone.

Miscarriages of Justice Organisation

Let's be sure about justice

Barry George's appeal against Jill Dando's murder will be a crucial test of our police and judiciary

Nick Cohen,Sunday July 14, 2002, The Observer

The murder of Jill Dando was a moment when the perennially rickety barrier between reporting and emoting collapsed. Kate Adie stood outside Dando's Fulham home and told viewers of her feelings on covering the death. Her respect for the memory of her friend then led her to assure the nation that 'Jill had no enemies'. However well-meant the tribute was, it was a disputable description of a woman who had been shot a few hours earlier.

Back in the studios, Martyn Lewis said television journalists 'are used to preserving an air of detachment', but neutrality would be strained for a day or so. An ITN reporter told Trevor McDonald: 'In many ways Trevor, there's an empty chair beside us.' The Kosovo conflict was at its height but all the papers and TV stations tore up their news lists to concentrate on a sensational killing.

It isn't original to say that the death of a celebrity is more important than a death in the Balkans or even a death in the family. (The wailing that followed the martyrdom of St Diana reached a lachrymose climax when one Michael Davies from Leeds told Radio 4 listeners: 'My wife died in April and I've shed far more tears for Diana than I did for my wife - no disrespect to my wife.') More interesting was the BBC's response to complaints that it had abandoned its treasured objectivity. The corporation accepted that its staff had said what they felt rather than reported what they knew, but this was a natural and human response to a horrible shock and no one should think the worse of them for that.

The BBC is no different from the rest of the dominant culture. From Britart to the daytime chatshows, from the demands that the victims of crime should have a say in determining a court's sentence to identity politics, authentic feeling is preferred to cold thought. The BBC was right in one respect: this is a time you brand yourself as inhuman and unnatural if you master your grief. The insistence that feeling trumps thought and that loss and victimhood confer authority on the sufferer has many snares, not least for the criminal justice system.

Tomorrow, Barry George will ask the Court of Appeal to overturn his conviction for Jill Dando's murder. The evidence which sent him down for life wasn't so much slender as anorexic. There was no murder weapon, no confession, no connection to Dando and no motive. George was the local weirdo who lived alone in great squalor. He had an old conviction for attempted rape and secretly photographed women in the streets of Fulham.

He also yearned for celebrity by association. He'd variously claimed to be the cousin of Gary Glitter and Jeff Lynne. (NB younger readers and judges: Lynne was the lead singer of a Seventies combo, the Electric Light Orchestra.) George took Glitter's real name (Paul Gadd), then changed it to Steve Majors in honour of Lee Majors, star of The Six Million Dollar Man (another Seventies smash, kids) and then pretended to be Freddie Mercury's cousin. You wouldn't want him as a neighbour, particularly if you were a woman and you didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out why the police were suspicious.

Yet all they had to present to the Old Bailey was a tiny fragment of gunpowder which may have got on to George's coat during some very sloppy forensic work. His flat was filled with rotting rubbish. He and it stank. The man who never cleaned was, none the less, meant to have cleaned off all other forensic traces of the murder. Apart from dodgy forensics, there was contestable evidence from identity parades, and that was it. The jury, the police, much of the press and, for understandable reasons, Nick Ross and other friends of Dando were adamant that George had been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty. The feeling that a shocking crime must have been solved was irresistible.

In 1980, the innocent Birmingham Six tried to sue the police from their prison cells. Lord Denning said that if he accepted that the police had beaten confessions out of them, the men would have to be released. 'This,' he said as he threw out the case, 'is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say, "It cannot be right these actions should go any further".'

In his retirement, the old brute mused that the campaign which freed the Birmingham Six years later wouldn't have pummelled his and the law's reputations if the men had been hanged on conviction, as they would have been in the good old days. Judicial murder, he said, would have 'satisfied the whole community'.

'The community' will doubtless be satisfied if the Court of Appeal upholds George's conviction. Brian Cathcart's account of the affair - Jill Dando, Her Life and Death (Penguin �7.99) - describes how the police were desperate to remove the stain of incompetence left by the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and how hard officers worked. How many Londoners want to believe that the Met hasn't reformed itself? How many would feel comfortable knowing that a killer could execute one of the most famous women in the country - on a public street at 11.30am - and laugh when an innocent man took his place in the cells? Denning expressed a cowardly popular desire frankly. There's much 'the community' doesn't want to know.

The community will still pay a price if the judges don't act. The main grounds for George's appeal is that the Dando trial began to reverse a century of legal reform which had imposed ever-tighter controls on identifying suspects. Only one of the dozens of people who were in the west London street on the day of Dando's murder put George at the scene. She said she saw him hours before the killing. He was wearing a black suit. Two of Dando's neighbours saw the gunman within seconds of the killing. They said he wasn't wearing a suit but a long coat and didn't identify George.

To plug the gaping hole in their case, the prosecution relied on three other witnesses who had seen a man in the street two hours before the killing. They had been shown videos of George standing in an identity parade. They sort of picked him out and sort of didn't. One, Charlotte de Rosnay, asked to see two faces again. One was George's. She thought and thought until she was asked if she could make a positive identification. She couldn't. Her mother-in-law, who had been staying with her at the time, lingered on the same two faces and said she had a 'gut feeling' that George was the man. She, too, couldn't be positive. The third witness was also interested in George, but couldn't be sure.

The prosecution was allowed to use witnesses who hadn't identified George as being in the street on the day of the killing to support the one witness who had. As Cathcart says, by the time they gave evidence to the jury they knew that George was the suspect. As is natural and human, they sounded far more certain in court than they had when they looked at the line-up.

The defence will argue tomorrow that the Dando trial overturned safeguards in the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act and the codes of conduct governing identity parades. The police and prosecution were allowed to turn the failure to identify a culprit into the positive identification.

In the past, a positive identification meant a witness looked at a line-up and said: 'Yup, I'm sure that's him.' After the Dando case, a positive identification is: 'I feel in my gut it could be him, but my head tells me I can't be sure.' If feelings are allowed to replace thoughts, many innocent members of the community will be locked away.

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HMP Armley, Leeds, found guilty of death of Paul Wright, but family still angry.

"My sister and I are pleased the inquiry has at last taken place, but we are disappointed that we had to take the Home Office to court to get this inquiry and that it was ordered more than five years after Paul's death.

"We are also disappointed that many of our questions remain unanswered and are concerned that the answers to these questions may never be revealed. I think the Prison Service has covered up what happened and I'm still very concerned about the poor level of medical care in prisons, notably in Armley itself. Some of the people criticised in this report still work there."

Moira Bennett, aunt of Paul Wright

Prison Service Accused Over Death In Custody Ananova,July 11, 2002

The family of a man who suffered a fatal asthma attack while in custody has accused the Prison Service of a cover up.

It comes after an independent inquiry into his death found the medical care he received was "inadequate".

The prison system was found to have "failed" Paul Wright, 33, whose treatment at the hands of an unsupervised doctor also contributed to his death at Armley Prison, Leeds, on November 7, 1996.

The inquiry, the first to be conducted into a death in custody under the Human Rights Act, was ordered after Mr Wright's mother and aunt won a High Court battle to force the Government into holding an independent investigation into the death.

The family argued that Mr Wright, who had a long history of asthma, was not given the correct medication and did not receive the proper levels of care while serving a three-and-a-half year sentence for fraud, possession of drugs and driving without a licence.

A central theme of the investigation focused on whether Dr Kumar Narain Singh, a former GP who had earlier been disciplined by the General Medical Council for neglecting his responsibilities to dying patients, had played an "excessive role" in the treatment of Mr Wright.

Dr Jon Davies, who headed the inquiry, carried out by human rights organisation Liberty on behalf of the Government, said: "Paul Wright's medical care was in the hands of a medical officer whose appointment to the Prison Service had been mishandled, who was, contrary to the cautionary and admonitory adumbrations of his record in front of the GMC, allowed to operate with the full franchise of an independent clinician.

"In the months before his death it seems clear to me that the medical service provided for Mr Wright was inadequate. In the days before his death there is considerable doubt whether Paul Wright had in his possession medication which might have saved him."

The inquiry report was welcomed by the dead man's aunt, Moira Bennett, of New Farnley, Leeds, who fought a long campaign for a public inquiry into his death. She said: "My sister and I are pleased the inquiry has at last taken place, but we are disappointed that we had to take the Home Office to court to get this inquiry and that it was ordered more than five years after Paul's death.

"We are also disappointed that many of our questions remain unanswered and are concerned that the answers to these questions may never be revealed. I think the Prison Service has covered up what happened and I'm still very concerned about the poor level of medical care in prisons, notably in Armley itself. Some of the people criticised in this report still work there."