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11.14 am
Mr. Roy Hattersley (Birmingham, Sparkbrook): I shall speak only briefly about the case that was set out so clearly, and in so much detail, by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-East (Mr. Turner).
In one way or another, I have been involved with the case for the past 14 years--initially because Ann Whelan, Michael Hickey's mother, was a constituent of mine and
visited my advice bureau. I pay tribute to the dogged determination with which she has argued her son's case for the past 15 years, but I confess that, when she first spoke to me, I was sceptical about her son's innocence. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South(Mr. Mullin) will confirm that it has never been my way to assume automatically that cases that he regards as miscarriages of justice are miscarriages of justice.He would say that I had come late to the defence of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford bombers, as they were once wrongly described.
My natural instinct when I first met Mrs. Whelan was to assume that mothers are inclined to believe that sons are innocent. At the time, her son was on the roof of the prison in which he was incarcerated, and I believed then that there was more emotion than evidence to her case. Over the years, however, I have become utterly convinced that the case that she made then was right. Week after week, month after month, additional evidence has been supplied to support that case.
Looking back, I now realise that the case began with the basic ingredient for a miscarriage of justice. Locally, there was a sense of absolute outrage--which was proper and understandable--that a newspaper boy doing his rounds in the morning, wholly unconcerned with what was going on, should stumble on robbers and be shot dead. In my experience, such outrage--fuelled by the newspapers, which say that someone must be convicted and that the case must be speedily resolved--puts pressure on police, which in itself is likely to produce the wrong result. I have no doubt that it was that sense of outrage that began the whole process.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-East pointed out, the entire case rests on Molloy's evidence. I do not want to repeat my hon. Friend's account of how that evidence was obtained, but there is little doubt that Molloy believed--I make no allegation that he was told--that, if he incriminated the men who were eventually convicted of the murder, he would escape on a lesser charge. That is speculation; but it is a fact that, had the events occurred 10 years later, Molloy's evidence would have been discounted, because it was wholly inconsistent with the rules laid down by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.
Molloy was kept for 10 days without proper assistance from a lawyer, and, for much of that time, without any support from his family. The records of his evidence are inadequate by any standards. The pattern continues. After the conviction, when it was known that appeals were likely and that Molloy had recanted--he had announced that he had been wrong to incriminate the other three men--14 visits were made to his cell. They were not recorded in diaries as they should have been, and the conversations that took place in the cell were also not recorded, as would now be required for evidence to be acceptable to the courts. That pattern of what would now be regarded as malpractice characterised the entire process, not simply of obtaining the conviction, but of ensuring that public outrage at the conviction, and the formal appeal, should not have the result that I consider justice to have required.
Two weeks ago, at Question Time, I referred to the strange incident of the bicycle. Although it is a small incident in the overall saga, it is indicative of the sort of procedures that were used. I knew about the bicycle because, during one of her visits to my constituency
surgery, Mrs. Whelan had told me that she had heard that there were fingerprints on it, about which we were not being told the full story. The bicycle was exhibited in court, but not much was said about it, although it was standing there in front of the jury. The bicycle was then left in the jury room. The jury, no doubt, felt emotionally involved because it was the bicycle of the innocent paper boy who had pedalled off in the morning and who had met his death when he was shot by robbers at the farm. The jury felt emotionally disturbed by the presence of the boy's bicycle as they considered their verdict.
We now know that there were fingerprints on the bicycle, but we do not know whose they were. We know that the fingerprints were not those of Michael Hickey or the men who were eventually convicted of the murder, but they were never identified. Over 10 years ago, on the suggestion of Mrs. Whelan, I asked the then Home Secretary about the fingerprints and he gave me an answer that I can describe only as evasive. He said that he knew nothing of them and referred me to the local police. The local police gave me an answer that was equally uninformative. It was not until months afterwards that we discovered that another person had been present at the crime scene--the fingerprints proved it, but that evidence was not provided during the trial.
When I asked the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Leeds, North-East (Mr. Kirkhope), about this the other day, he said that the defence counsel had known this before the appeal. The defence counsel certainly did not know it at the time of the trial. Indeed, the principal counsel, now a High Court judge, has said publicly that had he known it at the time of the trial, he would have asked for the scene of crime officer to be called in evidence and he would have cross-examined him about the possibility of other persons being there. That is just one example, but I could give many more--and I am sure that my hon. Friends will give many more.
I conclude by making one simple point. Michael Hickey had many misfortunes: the misfortune that he was implicated in a crime about which there were proper feelings of outrage; the misfortune that the police were determined to find someone to convict; the misfortune that a man--Molloy--believed it was to his advantage to incriminate others to receive a lighter sentence; the misfortune that the evidence of that man, which was recanted, was not available to the appeal because he died of a heart attack; and the misfortune that he appealed two or three years too early.
I do not mean that Michael Hickey's mother and those who supported him were over-enthusiastic; I mean that he went to appeal at a time when the Court of Appeal was taking the hardest possible line on these matters. I believe that had the appeal taken place in the new circumstances--when a different attitude and a different Lord Chief Justice prevail--a different result would have been obtained. For those reasons and because of the dubiety that covers so much of the evidence, I am sure that the Home Secretary should resubmit the case to the court. I hope that the Under-Secretary will tell us that that course has not entirely been ruled out.
Mr. Matthew Banks (Southport):
It is pleasing to see that a number of hon. Members have a particular interest in the case. I do not wish to go into the minutiae of it.I agree with a number of the points that have been made by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) and the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-East (Mr. Turner). One of the concerns that I have was expressed in an article inThe Guardian in June 1993. I refer to the remarks attributed to Mr. Tim O'Malley, who was the foreman of the jury at Stafford Crown court.
I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Cash) is in this place this morning.
Mr. William Cash (Stafford):
I welcome this debate and I pay tribute to the extremely careful analysis that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-East (Mr. Turner). I believe that this matter should be reviewed and referred to the Court of Appeal.
Mr. Banks:
The murder of Carl Bridgewater has unleashed a multitude of theories, conspiracies, scapegoats and excuses over the last 17 or so years--most of which have been eagerly recounted by hon. Members. Before I deal with the unsatisfactory story of the incarceration of the four convicted, let me make it clear that the first thought of many of us--particularly hon. Members on Government Benches--is for the victim and his family. As my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Leeds, North-East (Mr. Kirkhope), said:
If Carl had been spared his ordeal at Yew Tree farm in 1978, he would be just a few years younger than I am now. Nothing will ever compensate his family for his loss. What will always make me and others feel a little more whole, a bit more secure, is the knowledge that the real murderers are behind bars and that they are being punished as severely as society will allow. What must be causing untold distress to Carl's family is not so much the seeming uncertainty that surrounds the four convictions, but the continuing publicity that is accorded to the death of their boy. Paul Foot, who has been eulogised many times, said in his book "Murder at the Farm":
Between 1981 and 1987, there were four secret police inquiries into new evidence, which have cast doubt on those convictions. In 1987, the then Home Secretary,
my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Hurd), referred the case to the Court of Appeal. The appeal lasted nine weeks through 1988 and 1989 and was dismissed. In February 1993, the then Home Secretary, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, turned down leave for appeal by the three men on the ground that the new evidence presented to him did not cast doubt on the convictions. New evidence has been presented to the Home Secretary, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), and as the Home Office press release of 7 December 1995 put it:
As someone who takes a slightly different line on this matter from Labour Members, I, too, am appalled at the length of time it is taking for the case to be fully closed. It seems to me that it will never go away.
"I hope that all hon. Members will also bear in mind the appalling time that the family of young Carl Bridgewater have had. They have suffered terribly, and the continuing publicity and time involved in considering representations are causing them even more suffering."--[Official Report, 15 February 1996; Vol. 271, c. 1132.]
"Each time the case got any publicity, they said, the suffering of that awful September came back to haunt them. Whoever did the murder was to them of small significance compared to the fact that their son was gone."
"The Home Secretary has not decided whether to refer the case to the Court of Appeal, although at present he is minded not to do so."
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