The quashing of the torso murder convictions is a timely reminder that defendants can be victims too

Duncan Campbell. Friday July 19, 2002, The Guardian

The decision this week of the court of appeal to quash the conviction of Reg Dudley and Bob Maynard for two murders that took place more than quarter of century ago has a significance far beyond the courtroom and the north London pubs where the news would have been celebrated on Tuesday night. It is either appropriate or ironic, depending on your views on the criminal justice system, that the successful appeal should occur in the week in which the government published its Justice for All white paper.

Justice for all is a fine ambition. But the home secretary, when he talks of wanting to "rebalance the criminal justice system in favour of the victim", has to remember that sometimes the "victims" are those who are wrongly charged with crimes they did not commit in a bid to satisfy a demand for convictions.

It was as a result of an unspoken notion of justice for some that the two men were convicted at the Old Bailey. It was the 1970s and a time of great assumptions: assumptions that Irishmen with republican links who were arrested and charged with offences must be guilty; and assumptions that, if detectives told the court that the people in the dock had made a helpful confession, then those detectives were surely telling the truth.

There was also an unspoken belief that too many career criminals were getting away, if not with murder, then with serious crimes. This was used to justify a modus operandi that could be summarised as "we think you did it but we can't prove it so we'll massage the evidence". Why bother continuing an investigation when you could create your own "evidence"? The "verballing" of criminals - attributing compromising words to them that they did not say - became a routine practice. This was often justified as a desire to bring justice for all victims.

Then gradually, through the 1980s and 1990s, the sight of gaunt and angry people standing on the steps of the royal courts of justice in the Strand became a familiar one as more and more cases of miscarriage of justice emerged. The tide turned, jurors became more sceptical. Laws of evidence changed. It was no longer so easy to "fit up" defendants. Sir Robert Mark had already started the process of removing the hundreds of corrupt officers who had lined their pockets in the 1960s and 1970s but the increasing evidence that people had been wrongly convicted undermined the whole system; honest detectives found themselves having to deal with the legacy of their dishonest predecessors.

And that is why this week's appeal court decision is important. For more than 20 years, there has been evidence that Dudley and Maynard should not have been convicted. The man who helped convict them all those years ago was saying as early as 1980 that he had fabricated his evidence, yet it was another two decades before he was offered immunity from prosecution for perjury so that he could finally tell the truth. In the meantime, Maynard and Dudley were left to linger behind bars. Many within the police and the Home Office must have been aware of the injustice of this, yet the papers that would have cleared the men were shuffled or "lost".

Their conviction could have been quashed in the 1980s and would by now have been long forgotten except by the participants. Instead, it was allowed to fester so that once again, as details of what happened emerges, the police will be portrayed in a damaging light: one of the grounds of the appeal was that a "confession" taken down in longhand could not have been written in the time claimed. Once again the public will be made aware of police malpractice and once again the police will have to deal with the scepticism that this provokes.

Another reason this case is important is that it finally made it to the court of appeal only after it had been reinvestigated by the criminal cases review commission, the body that was set up in the 1990s to investigate such claims. If the CCRC had not become involved and discovered the timing discrepancies of the note-taking, Maynard and Dudley would never have had their convictions overturned. There are still many wrongly convicted people in jail and the longer they remain there the greater the damage to the criminal justice system.

"It cost my marriage. I lost my son's growing up," Bob Maynard said on Tuesday after the court had finally granted the appeal. "There are no ups, it's all down. If they were to say you've got �2m compensation or your life back, I want my life back."

Sadly, courts of appeal cannot restore lost years. It has been a long, long haul for Bob Maynard and Reg Dudley because all that time ago the police decided to take some shocking short cuts to try and convict them. In a desire to bring justice to victims, justice for all has to mean justice also for all those who are rounded up in the wake of a crime.

� Duncan Campbell is a former Guardian crime correspondent and covered the original trial

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