[Music] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Evolving Prisons with me, Kate and Carrie. If you want to listen to monthly bonus episodes, you can subscribe for only £3 per month by hitting the link in the show notes. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd be really grateful if you'd please rate the podcast on whatever platform you listen, as more ratings mean more people will discover the show. My guest today is Danny Barres. Danny is the chair of Promoting Prisoners Maintaining Innocence. Recently, the BBC aired a documentary about Andrew Malkinson, an individual from England who was wrongfully convicted of rape and spent 17 years in prison until he was released in December 2020. In this episode, I share some of Andy's clips from the BBC documentary about his experiences. Danny and I then chat about majority of verdicts and jury cases. How it can be difficult for innocent people to progress through prison and the difficulty they can face an obtaining compensation from the state upon their release from prison and their acquittal. To watch the full BBC documentary, click on the link in the show notes. I really hope you find this conversation informative. [Music] So, Danny, do you want to just tell me a little bit about the work that PPMI do censure the chair of them? OK, the primary aim of PPMI is to give support to current prisoners, ex-prisoners, and those on probation who maintain innocence. PPMI identifies, recognizes, and concentrates upon the unique problems suffered by those maintaining innocence whilst on-remound post-conviction and post-sentencing. But originally created to bring attention to the plight of prisoners, particularly lifers, who are unable to progress through the prison system because they were maintaining innocence. It gradually evolved to encompass specific problems related to those accused, incarcerated, or on probation. We have provided and provided a voice to those maintaining innocence, and around 400 people to this day. So, again, just to break the myth that everyone in prison thinks they're innocent, that's totally untrue. Obviously, during a trial, or during legal proceedings, many, many people may maintain that they're innocent as a means of getting through the trial. But usually once they're convicted amongst prisoners, for example, there's no pretense or very little pretense about innocence in the guilt. So, we do not judge. We do not take a particular person, let's say Malcolm's, and as you mentioned earlier on, we do not support a specific person in struggle for justice. That's not what we do. We look at Malcolm's, as a typical case, not a specific case. And I would say that we look at the subpostmaster's case, not as a, or not to seek to generate a narrative about the post office or about software or about Fujitsu, who cares is our approach. The fact is that over a thousand people were convicted, and those numbers, it's very difficult to get the right numbers, but I think 734 were convicted on private prosecutions. But in order to get a private prosecution through, there has to be a magistrate or a judge, there has to be lawyers. That's what we're concerned about, not the post office, not who was running the post office and what conspiracy there was. We're talking about the broader conspiracy, where nobody seems to be concerned about truth. Everyone is concerned about conviction, and this so-called public interest. Finally, we focus minds on the fragility of the binary approach to guilt and innocence. Now this is really important. If we think of joint enterprise, I don't know if that means anything to you, Kagan, do you want to enterprise? It does, but it probably won't to some of my listeners because we don't have joint enterprise in some countries, so maybe just explain a little bit about what that is. Okay, so let's suppose, Kagan, that I'm really upset, so you're a great friend of mine, and I'm really upset with someone who owes me money. I say to you, look, Kagan, can you drive me down to the sky? I'm going to go and see this guy and have it out with him, because he owes me money for ages, and I'm beyond myself, so can you drive us down there? So, you drive me down there, I knock on the guy's door, a fight breaks up, and he ends up dead. I'll be charged with murder, I might claim Mansfield, I didn't intend to kill him, but joint enterprise means that whatever I'm charged with, you will be charged with, because you drove me there. And they will ask you such questions as, well, did you know he was upset with that guy, and you're going to say, well, yes, did you know he was planning to kill him? And you're going to say, well, no, but that's exactly what he says, so in other words, they're going to match joint enterprise as the fact that because you assisted me, therefore, you're guilty of the same offense. So, this binary approach, you're either guilty of the whole thing, or you're innocent of the whole thing. It is absolutely crazy. If we think of Scotland where you have guilty, innocent, and not proven, that's better. But what we have, and it's like a disease which is spreading, which is where I'll give another example of the same principle, which is that, so I'm a landlord. I've now got to do checks on you. I've got to decide whether you're a legal immigrant, or whether I've got to do two diligence on you. I can't just rent his mind. Now, if in fact I rent this to you, and you're using that as a drug base, it is highly possible that I would be charged with drug offenses, because you're using the flat I rented to you as a base for your drug trade. It sounds laughable, but it's not. It's extremely serious. And I did know a guy relatively intimately that had the misfortune. He was a tradesman, and he had a garage, and he rented his garage out to someone who used it for trading in cocaine, I believe, with some form of drug, and he was charged with drugs offenses, because he rented out his garage. So that gives you an idea, not just of the notion of joint enterprise, but of the problem about this binary approach to guilt and innocence. First of all, the presumption of innocence should be sank or sank for all, including the media and the general public or abandoned. Secondly, we cannot judge any individual innocence or guilt. I've mentioned that. In other words, people aren't totally guilty or totally innocent. Take the case I mentioned, well, you've driven me to somewhere where a crime in inverted commas is committed, then you're not totally innocent because you've actually participated in it. The guy that lends a car to someone who commits a crime in it, he's not totally innocent. Unless he says he just didn't know the guy, well, why would you lend your car to a guy you didn't know that you knew him, so you must have known that he was a bit of a dodgy character. Again, this must be on a spectrum. It cannot be just guilty or innocent. So, Malcomson, we wouldn't get involved with on an individual basis. We would only want to use that as an example of how the justice system has malfunctioned, how the jury system has malfunctioned, how the CPS is malfunctioned. Now, this is quite important. We should try to avoid using loaded terminology, such as offender, ex-offender, victim, and that would be a subtle load of people, evidence and seized. In prison, people are referred to as offenders, right, and as an offender manager. Yeah, that's a particular function in the prison service. Well, they're not all offenders. For example, people who are on Raman, the 16,000 people are on Raman in our prisons today. How can you regard them as offenders? If you're doing so, then you are breaking the presumption of innocence. In a similar way, you can't say someone is an ex-offender. When we use the word victim, there is an assumption there that it's been a crime. Well, obviously, if someone's broken into a house, you can assume there's a crime and the people whose house was broken into as a victim. But when it's one person's opinion against another, if we start using the word victim, we are already presupposing what will happen in our court case. So in other words, you're not respecting the notion of presumption of innocence, because presumption of innocence may be that no crime is ever committed. Evidence, the word evidence used in trials, when it's not evidence, it's just a piece of paper. For the average man in the street, if I say to my next door neighbor here, this is evidence. He thinks that in some way it's been validated. And yet when the police or the CBS use the word evidence, there has been no external validation. It's just an opinion. It's a piece of paper. They picked up an interpreter, for example. And that comes on to the last one I mentioned, there are many others, or the word seized. So, if the police come into my house, or not into my house, I go to see the police to help them in an inquiry. And they say, "Can you bring with you anything that might help us?" And I say, "Yeah, I've got some stuff I did due diligence on a client mind, for example." And I bring that to them. When that goes into court, they refer to that as a document that was seized. Now, we know why they do that. They do that to influence the jury and the judge. In the same way as they use the word evidence, we can refer to the other, many other words like that. And I believe, we believe, that's fundamentally wrong, that there are other words they can use apart from the seized, like this is a document that we were given. They can say they don't have to use the word evidence. They can use the word document or photo. They don't have to say evidence. Next thing we should concentrate on the system rather than individuals, and we criticize a system which seeks to convict rather than establish the truth. As recent cases have shown, the effects of conviction on those who self-perceive as innocent are different and often worse than for those who accept guilt. Now, that's another important thing, Kagan. If you think of the subpostmasters, the very fact that these people self-perceive as innocent changes their behavior in many ways. For example, their innocence is such that they can't believe the system is conspiring against them. So when the lady is told that she's taken 30,000 pounds from the post office, she pays it back even though she hasn't even done it. When her life is destroyed, did she self-perceive as guilty genuinely? People who are, let's say, if she realized that she was a criminal, she wouldn't have done that. That's not criminal behavior. Criminal behavior is such that people protect themselves. They put everything in their wife's name or their friend's name or someone else's name. When they get convicted, the career criminal, they make sure they have no assets. There's nothing for them to give back. Let's talk a little bit about wrongful conviction because I feel like I've personally heard people say, "Well, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime." And that if you're in prison, you deserve to be there. But that's simply not true because there are many people who have been wrongfully convicted, even here in the UK. I'm an ordinary citizen. And ordinary people should be aware that they can be taken. Just taken. Go up into anybody. And once they've got you, they don't want to let you go. How are you feeling, Andy? All right. Yeah. You can't prepare yourself. You don't see it coming. It's just, your life changes in an instant. And is there any stats or information at all on how many people have been wrongfully convicted in the UK? Or is that quite difficult to see? It's impossible. It's impossible. Because I mentioned to you before, there's a guy I know that I think I can probably mention what he did for a little. He was a merchant banker. You've got to put him in prison. Again, it's this thing about, I don't know if you know, there's a whole series of frauds committed in the film industry. It was basically, it's a tax scam, basically. But they sold the notion of makers. I don't know exactly how it works, but there's something like, you make a film and you get tax relief on your investment. So these people were going around and getting people to invest in films, the particular case, I know someone who was 100,000 pounds, he was a merchant banker, 100,000 pounds in the film system. He got tax relief on it. In fact, the tax relief was never approved, so he never actually got the tax relief on it. And he got a substantial prison sentence. He got the same prison sentence as the guy that organizes it. Again, this is a whole notion of joint enterprise. Well, first of all, I have to accept that in my mind, where people are not innocent or guilty, they're on a spectrum of innocence and guilt. That's extremely difficult. I'm not the right person to ask that. But in any case, how can there be any statistics about innocence and guilt? They can't be. As I say, from a PPMI point of view, we don't really, when someone comes to us and says, I was convicted, but I'm innocent, or I am in prison, but I'm innocent. As I say, if you look at the numbers, there are hundreds of thousands of people over the time of PPMI that have been in prison, but we've only got 400 on our books. What does that mean? It doesn't mean there are only 400 people innocent. It just means that there's only 400 people who have come to us. But given that the justice system believes in its own infallibility, there can be no statistics. I would love an academic to actually try to do something like that. But the justice system has no interest in undermining itself. It would be great, wouldn't it? But, you know, you're never going to get the justice minister in any country to say, oh, yeah, we've got loads of innocent people in prison, or we've committed loads of innocent people. That's one of the reasons that Carlos Gown case, interestingly, because the Japanese authorities have a record of 99% convictions. And that's exactly why Carlos Gown had to escape. The chances of him getting a fair trial were almost zero. So do I blame him for escaping? Certainly not. Does that make me a criminal? I'll leave you to judge. It's interesting you say about the justice system, because I was reading recently about majority verdicts, which we'll go on to talk about, but appeal the charity who work with people who have been wrongfully convicted. They recently published a report, which you've maybe seen about majority verdicts in England and Wales. And there was a bit within the report that discussed concerns about impartiality of jury deliberations in a specific jury case. And the report showed a response from the House of Lords, which said, in the interests of maintaining the efficiency of the jury system, the risk of occasional miscarriages of justice may acceptably be tolerated. In other words, one must accept some dubious verdicts, even in cases of the utmost gravity, as the cost to be paid for protecting the jury system. And I was horrified to read this. And I think you're horrified because you have moral compass. Remember, Cliff Richard, when the policeman detective inspector or whatever was stood in front of Cliff Richard's house. Cliff Richard wasn't there in Portugal or something. And he said, anyone that's got evidence against effectively unparaphrasing anyone's evidence against him. They should contact us immediately. I mean, I think if you have any moral fiber and a degree of intelligence and experience, you would say that that is a boring behavior. You're encouraging people into dilation, as the French recall it, the sort of thing that happened during the Nazi occupation of France. You say that guy is a Jew, you know, it's sort of amazing. So people seeking to prove that the jury system is somehow infallible, have got a real logical bind. I think it was 1967 was it that the, it was changed from unanimous to majority. And of course, in the States, it's still unanimous. And in Scotland, it's different. It's a majority, but they also have the third. You know, they have guilty and not proven. So it's different in every country in France. I can go to great detail about that, but that may not be. They have a much better way of handling this as well. You have three sorts of offenses for staff. You have a, it's called a contour in France. So just a misdemeanor. And then you have a daily in the middle, which covers most cases. And then you have a clean crime, which is usually violence related sexual, sexually related. So you have the three categories, the lower category dealt with by a police tribunal. The middle category is dealt by judges. And that would account for most of the complex cases as well, like fraud, the idea that tourists can judge fraud to me is astonished. And I'm not talking about if someone that goes onto a website and makes a scam and rob some old lady of a pension. Now that might be relatively easy. But when we think about the libel case, a jury judging that, you know, when the judge has said these people have been fixing libel, you come back to terminology. When in fact, that is their job. They fix libel. There's nothing suspicious about fixing a right. That's what they do. Now, when you go to a bank and you get a mortgage, someone has fixed the mortgage rate. It doesn't mean they ripped you off. No, that's the way it's presented. So that's the way they do it in France. So it's only the cream, which is the under violence or sexual thing. Really serious crime terrorism is judged with a jury, but embedded unless a nine person jury, I think, and embedded in the jury are three judges. So they will have a degree of guidance as well. Now, remember, their brief is beyond reasonable doubt. So the problem with the whole notion of majority is that two people at least on that jury thought there was a reasonable doubt. Well, if the decisions got to be beyond reasonable doubt, then what we're saying is that those two people read it, or they heard different. Now, so I think that already we see that a system which relies on on majorities must be infallible. Sorry, must be fallible. If we accept the notion of beyond reasonable doubt beyond reasonable doubt. Now, judges will say, it's my job to judge the law. It's the jury's job to judge the facts. The trouble we have with that is that in many complex cases, the facts are too complex, and that the people that might be able to sit on that jury who would understand those facts. For example, I understand interest rates or things like that have been excluded, because the prosecution will say, no, he can't sit on that jury because he's biased. He's biased because he actually understands it. On from the other side, they might say, I'm going to do that guy because he's got links to the police. I don't know. But the whole notion of jury selection, I think, is screwed up. Because, in fact, we should be the other way around. We should be trying to get people on juris if that's what we're going to do, who actually understand these things, not people that deliberately don't understand these things because they're going to judge the facts. But, I'm sure you've heard the expression men's rare. When it comes to judging what someone thought, how can you be judging the facts? No, you're giving your opinion, but your opinion might be based upon the fact that you don't like people with Irish accents. Or you don't like people like me from a Jewish background. Or you don't like me because I'm from a business background because you don't believe in business, whatever it is, or you don't believe in. So we're also playing to people's unintentional bias. So if you want to minimize the risk of convicting someone who's innocent, and that is exactly the point you were making, it was interesting when Cliff Richard was interviewed after his terrible affair. An interviewer said to him, "Well, you know, the trouble is that if we take your attitude, guilty people will go free." And his response, and I'm paraphrasing totally, was, "Yes, but if I take your attitude, innocent people will be convicted, and that's far worse. Far worse. How many guilty people will go innocent?" Well, you know, it depends on me. Obviously, if you let a murderer go free and he then rushes around and kills other people or rates other people, yes, it seems like the end of the world. But what people don't understand and one of the burgeoning things of TPMI is the effect it has on innocent people, committing suicide, self harm, breaking up marriages, children without parents. It is horrific what happens to the innocent because, as I said earlier on, the innocent by definition are not prepared for these things to happen. You know, so when you have poker, you know what, poker is a proceeds of crime act I suppose. I mean, we get it all the time, you get several and joint liability. So someone who only played a minor part in a crime, let's say it was a 50 million bound fraud, you see, some guy, they get convicted not only were they face the same sentence, but they're going to face the same poker. So this guy here is going to lose everything. Now, the real criminals that did it, they've had more their money, they've sent all their money because they were managing this risk, as you said, don't want to do time, don't do the crime, but they accept that risk and so they've made sure that they've got it all stuffed away. I mean, the system is just grossly unfair to people maintaining innocence. So yeah, I, now, I've had arguments with the legal fraternity about jury systems where it seems that many, many people say you can't criticize the jury system because it's the fundamental bulwark against, let's say conviction of the poor. I mean, I've heard that. Why? Well, because they have the, you know, because there'll be a degree of sympathy within the jury or which there wouldn't be if there were judges. I really don't understand. And I just don't accept it. Now, as I said, if we go back to 12 people, unanimous, there's a much better chance that they'll arrive at the right result because in amongst those 12 you might find someone with an ounce of knowledge. But when you allow majority decisions, you're fundamentally, I believe, undermining the jury system because of this question of beyond reasonable doubt. So how comes if these human beings are equal, which is what the assumption is, you've got 12 people and they're going to come to this decision, this sort of aggregated decision. How comes you say beyond reasonable doubt, but then you allow majority decision? It's interesting, like, that you brought up Scotland because, yes, Scotland have got the three, they've got the not guilty, not proven or guilty. And they also require corroboration, which I found interesting that England and Wales don't require corroboration. I didn't have a clue about that until I was looking more into this for chatting with you. So Scotland have those extra, what you might say, protections there. However, what I think is still absurd is that in Scotland, you have a jury of 15 and you only require eight people to believe that person is guilty for that person to be convicted. So yes, they've got those extra protections I just mentioned, but you can have seven people think that that person isn't guilty and that person is still convicted of a crime, which is very scary, I think. Absolutely. And I don't prefer to be an expert on the Scottish system. That's the problem. Okay, so I didn't really want to pronounce on that. It does seem to me that because there are the three cases and then you mentioned corroboration, that that would be better. Now, the other problem with the jury system is you cannot appeal on the grounds that the jury got the wrong decision. And PPMI we made it, we had a meeting with the law commission, we made a submission to the law commission. And the law commission, probably not going to be accepted by the politicians because they'd be accused of being soft on crime or something. The law commission suggested that as I believe is the case in Canada that the jury should be obliged to motivate their decision. In other words, for them to actually write something down saying, we are convicting Kagan because she's a Scottish lawyer, whatever it is. They got to say what it is. Now, now, once they say that, then of course you could appeal, not attacking the jury, but looking at why they convicted, and say, well, they got that wrong. So it's not a no longer is it a personal attack. So, again, we see a situation where if you take the broad sort of aggregate of people involved in criminology or the law or things like that, there'll be various views. If you had a situation, we've got three judges, the French thing and six jurors, I think there's certainly three judges. Then the judges can say, well, think about this, think about that, they might take it as well, but who cares. Now we've got a backlog in the system, wouldn't really make much difference with it. Now, my view is that we should be open to criticism of the jury system. My personal view is that the jury system on the majority verdict basis is completely wrong, not just slightly wrong completely wrong. So sorry, the unanimous verdict is slightly wrong. But again, we're reducing the possibility of convicting the innocent. And I also believe that, yes, if a jury is unable to write down why they know the principal reasons why they've convicted. I don't believe they're capable of being a jury. So that sounds elitist, but, you know, if a guy cannot read and write, he should not be a majority. Why, because he's going to be faced with evidence. So what are you going to base his view of. So he's got to be able to read write it up. There should be other qualifications and just having two legs and two arms or being in a wheelchair life. There should be greater than that if we're going to give that power to these people. Now we can mitigate it by returning to unanimous decisions. And just imagine the behavior of the prosecution. When they come out with extremely biased remarks. At the moment, they can take a fly on that. But they would have to be extremely careful about upsetting that one person or jury that takes offense and says, well, no, I mean, if the guy is capable of saying that sort of atrocity. And I'm not the legal profession. I've got not much respectful, because they do lie cheat, do all the other things that normal human beings do. The idea that somehow because he's a learned fellow that somehow he's got a moral compass which is beyond that of you and I is ridiculous. And just say one final thing on jury's which I think is an indisputable argument. The jury system is infallible or virtually infallible. We all know it's not infallible because there have been innocent people convicted by jury's. And so let's suppose that we have to assume that the jury system is infallible. Then why is it that certain cases or qcs as they were not just 10% more than others, but then 10 times as much as others. If they're not being neutral, then why is it they can be so easily influenced by someone. And the proof that they are easily influenced by someone is that he earns so much more. Because his reputation is to win all his cases. What he's got this wonderful reputation he convinced the jury, he convinced the jury. How guilty people go innocent. Then you could look at the jury system. If that is really your major concern. No, let's have professionals doing the thing, my opinion say this is now we're dealing with BPMI bit, my opinion, let's have professionals doing it or being involved in it. Let's have unanimous decisions. Let's try to make sure that the people on the jury are totally aware, and that they've realized that their responsibility is not just to act upon their feelings, but they're supposed to be judging the facts. And if there are no facts, and it's just a question of men's rail, then if we're down to that saying well okay yeah she drove Danny to the, to the house and then he killed someone. So you've got to say what what was going on in our mind. Is that sufficient to convict. As I say she might be slightly guilty or relatively innocent, but she didn't commit the murder. So I really have a problem with that, and this whole idea of the political idea that in order to stop something, we're going to make the maximum number of people guilty possible. Because we're going to devolve power to the landlord. So he's going to judge whether you're fit to do that, and he can always now defend himself. Oh, I know she was Scottish, but I didn't reject her because she was Scottish. I rejected her because when I looked at her due diligence I didn't think it's going to happen. It's more that I'm going I'm diverting from the jury system problem, that I'm guessing I should say. You know again the idea that you can outsource justice to someone else is again a fundamental principle. I mean we stand better chance of getting justice if you put people that studying criminology. I'm delighted to let you know that CrimeCon UK returns to London on the 21st and 22nd of September 2024. If you're not sure what it is, it's the world's leading true crime event and is partnered by True Crime, the expert led true crime channel. From fascinating sessions with some of the biggest names in true crime to spending time with your favourite podcasters, CrimeCon UK is an unforgettable way for you to really immerse yourself in the true crime community. I will be there so I would love it if you would come and join me and you can quote prisons for a special 10% discount on your tickets. Information about guest speakers and content contributors are being released on the CrimeCon UK social channels to keep your eyes peeled for more exciting announcements and I really hope to see you there in September. I had no idea which way it was going to go. I was just looking at people in the eye and trying to gauge them, not lingering too long on one person because I'm aware it looks like I'm staring at them, but looking at everyone I'm going. These people are going to decide my future, you know, they might condemn me. It's quite tense, the jury came back by a majority of 10 to 2. They found Mr Malkinson guilty. I just can't believe it, absolute disbelief, horror and fear. It's interesting because it goes past just the jury so appeal in their report, they state the names of 56 people in England and Wales who were convicted by a majority jury and were later found innocent. But Andrew Malkinson is one of the people in there and from what I do know, it seems like that maybe not the fault of a majority jury because from the BBC documentary that they did about Andrew, it seems that the witnesses were not honest. They were portrayed to be very honest people, but they weren't honest. They had a lot of convictions. So it also goes past the jury. Like, well, what are the jury being presented with? Maybe what they're being presented with? They have made the correct decision, but actually have they been presented with the truth and that's the scary thing. Well, as I said earlier on, and this is a PPMI principle, you know, you have to presume innocence, but moreover, what we have is a system, certainly in the UK, where, and this is a difference with France. In France, you have a huge density sits between the prosecution of defense, supposedly, obviously there's a degree of corruption in that degree of sympathy, one side or the other. There's a degree of political influence, because some of the huge are supposedly left wing, etc, etc, so there can be accusations, but nevertheless, there is someone that is supposed to be looking at the truth. In the UK system, there's no policeman out there trying to discover the truth. Really, he's not going to waste his time if he sees it, because he's got to lock people up. That's what the battle press is asking for. Lock them up, throw away the key, and we have to fight against that tendency to just say, well, and it's really othering your othering. To what extent are the police going to use the Attorney General's expression pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry and divulge all of the evidence in inverted commas? When I say evidence here, I'm using their expression, but all of the documents, as I said, now if we go back to the Lee and Allen case, in that case, he was accused of rape. I think he was a student at the time, and the police didn't look at the accusers, notice I don't use victim, because for me, Lee and Allen was the victim, he was falsely accused, because the police refused to look at her mobile phone. When they did eventually look at her mobile phone, and the police already had the mobile phone, so they could have looked at it, but they chose not to reveal that evidence. There was plenty of evidence that, in fact, she was a willing participant in her. Now, obviously, when we come on to rape, my wife, I can have sexual relations in my wife, that doesn't mean on a particular time, particular date, she didn't want sex and I've raped her. Now, again, we can get into that great debate about sexual offenses, very difficult subject, very difficult for everyone. But at the end of the day, if the police withhold information because they think it will not, or it will undermine their case, then that, for me, is morally corrupt, and it's legally corrupt. And that's what the Attorney General says. Did they follow all reasonable lines of inquiry, and did they reveal all the information? So, yes, it's not just a question of the jury system, that's what you were saying, it's also a question of the quality and quantity. My parole officer always said, "We have no way of knowing the level of Mr. Markingsons at risk until we've had some kind of an in-behaviour program." You're all sitting in a little group and everybody talks about what they've done, everything that happened in their life, and what led up to them attacking someone. And going through it in detail, I get realised I couldn't do it. You can't sit there and pretend you've horrifically raped somebody when you know you haven't. So, I'm trying all kinds of rational arguments in front of the parole board. None of you here can believe, surely, that nobody has ever been wrongly convicted, and there's no innocent people in jail. That's an untenable position, right? Yeah, yeah, okay. But I'm telling you, I'm one of those people who's been wrongly convicted, and I'm completely innocent. And you're saying, "The only thing I've got is to do these courses," which is predicated on describing what you've been convicted for. When I've already told you I haven't done it, what would you suggest I do? Should I lie? Oh, no, no, Mr. Markings, we don't need to lie. It's all I can't do them. Oh, well, you seem to be in a catch-22. That's what they said, they said those words. You're in a catch-22. They even made it very explicit. If you don't do the courses, you're going to be in a very long time. And the problem doesn't, you know, the nightmare doesn't stop after the trial and things because Andrew Malkinson talks about in that documentary about being in prison. And first of all, being in prison when you're innocent must be very traumatic. Never mind being in prison wrongly accused as a sex offender. That must be even more traumatic, I think, because they are more vulnerable in prison. But my point is he spoke about the fact that he was almost in a catch-22, where he couldn't get parole because he had to, one of the requirements was to do the programs where he spoke about his offending behaviour. But he did not commit the crime, so how could he possibly speak about that offending behaviour? And that goes for other people who are innocent, I'm sure, where they're almost stuck in prison because they're not seem to be talking about their crime, but they didn't commit it, so how can they possibly talk about it? This is an extremely difficult subject, but there are things in prison related to victim awareness, and when we talk about they are progressing prisons maintain instance, is that to someone who maintains their innocence, the classic route is to go to an appeal. When people are convicted, they go initially either to an ACAP prison, which is the top security prison, or a BCAP prison, which actually is often far worse, BCAP prison like Wandsworth, which has been described as disgusting, and it's even worse than that, you wouldn't put two dogs together in one of those cells. So why you would put two humans together, one of whom might well be a drug taking, psychopath or potential murderer, why you would put two people together in a room that was built in the 19th century for one person that has a little, it's linked to the outside of the window, and all you can see are bricks, and that they share a toilet, an open toilet, etc, this is resulting, but just imagine, and I want your listeners to be worse, imagine trying to present an appeal from those conditions You don't have the facilities needed, you've got no access to the internet, despite what people say in the gut oppressed prisoners don't all have phones, and their phones are not allowed in prison, you can't contact anyone, yes you may have a phone on the wall, but you know there's all this thing about approved numbers and various other problems associated with that, and people can't just call in, and you can't do that, you've got to call out, so Now, so we've got AECAP BECAP, I say the facilities in ACAP prisons apart from let's say Bell Marsh might be an exception, there might be other exceptions, I don't know, certainly there have been cases where ACAP prisoners moved on to CECAP prisons want to go back, because the conditions in CECAP were worse than in ACAP, so it's not necessary conditions, but it's a question of regime. So if you go from BECAP where you've got no chance of preparing documentation or something like that, into CECAP where you've got a better chance, because you'd be able to go to the library more often frequently, you can consult documents, you can have meetings with lawyers, you can have meetings with your family or with friends and things like that, it's a much easier regime where you're going to be going to work, you're going to have education, you're going to have all those other things. And then really what you want to do is to get people into DCAP open conditions, where they can get out outside and work so they can have some access to the internet, for example, they can do all sorts of things and they can actually prepare a case. Now, and again I'm digressing from what you said, but the notion of making an appeal of them is determined or the ability to make it a bit determined by the progression of the prisoner within the prison system. So when you get to DCAP, you can actually start seriously making an appeal because of the right freedom of the regime. There are things you can do, visit to much easier, they're longer, there's less violence, there's a much easier relationship with the staff, et cetera, et cetera. But of course you've been validated to get to DCAP. How have you been validated? Well, you've gone through, depends what your alleged crime is, but you'll be validated through the prison system, there's a thing called Oasis, which is the system which is supposed to take to follow the prisoner around but it doesn't work. It's never been updated, it's supposed to be updated before the prisons transferred, but they can't do that because the prison slot comes up, they need to space so they move the guy on before the Oasis is updated. But within that, there will be a sentence plan. In the sentence plan, the first thing would be a victim awareness program. Now the victim awareness program that you've got to do can vary. So if it's a serious sexual or violent offense, there's a different sort of victim awareness thing, I think. But certainly at the lower end, there's what they call an in cell victim awareness thing, where you just fill it in, and in there, they have questions like, how's your victim change behavior, because of your, in what ways is your victim change behavior. But if you answer that, and you don't answer, and this is one of the ways that PPMI helps, when innocent people say, well, I can't answer that because I don't accept that it was my victim, you say, okay, well, answer it in such a way as you say, the victims, the victims in this case, have not changed their behavior to my knowledge, you can get through that. And when we talk about PPMI and its origins where life is, were obliged to do serious courses in victim awareness, where they were obliged to accept that there was a victim, even though they maintain a sentence, we believe that has finished. That's no longer the case, there are ways to do it without accepting that it was, was your victim. So it may not be as bad as it was, but it's still bad. So, progressing through prison is vital, not just to make an appeal, but the difference between being in one's a being in, honestly, Bay or Ford or one of the open prisons is like night and day. So in terms of the time you spend in prison, it is fundamental as well. And you might not be able to answer this, but from the people that you've worked with, what's the lasting impact the wrongful conviction has on people, because even when they get out of prison, you know, being labeled as as an offender for so long when you've not done anything and people believing that you've done something or how traumatising prison is, what kind of lasting impact is the saving on people? Well, we go from the sublime to the ridiculous. I think that down at the bottom end, the worst possible case, you have someone that comes out of prison, and even though he's innocent, he's lost his family because she just couldn't survive on her own. And the kids have been, absolutely, they've had to move scores and try to go somewhere where it wasn't known. I mean, that's really terrible. We can talk if we talk about suppose masters, we know there have been suicides, but we know people have lost their homes, lost their families. But that's the worst possible level. And it doesn't matter, you see, what the crime is, because all of that is extremely relative. I mean, around here where I live, I think maybe a speeding fine was seen as a terrible thing to do. There are false accusations and false convictions, because we start with the accusation, right? So even a false accusation is a problem, even if there's no conviction. Ah, but wasn't he accused of just the way people think the beds, whether they like you or not, whether they know you are not. If they can other you by saying, Oh, that guy up there. Yeah, he was accused of blackmail. So he was accused of blackmail. Where's the presumption of innocence, and we have to promote this presumption of innocence, not just at the time in a stereo level, not just amongst lawyers, prosecution, and defense, and in the middle, if you like, if there is a little sentence, I don't think there is. And then going all the way down to the man in the street, one of the objectives we set ourselves in PPMI is to convince people one at a time, because, you know, I convince you, not convince you, but raise doubts about certain things and then you talk to other people and you ask them, that's the way we do it. So the effects of convicting the innocent can be whatever is the worst possible thing you can think of, going to something which is an inconvenient, but it's been a bit of an eye. So I don't think there's there's no particular case, many people, many people are more vulnerable than others, but again, going to prison for, I'd say 90% of the population is going to have the effect of PTSD, as it would have in the army and I'm an ex soldier so I feel slightly inclined to talk about. So if we say that people that go through major trauma are now suffering from this and have to be treated differently and looked after. Well, the same thing must apply to people going to prison, but not even kind of person. People just convicted of being put on probation because these people are vulnerable to their reputation. In other words, they can't live without their reputation, whether they're schoolteachers or vickers or bankers or whatever it is their reputation is crucial. So we have to try and change public opinion on that as well. And that's why we have to undermine this notion of infallibility all the time, not just to try and change the opinion from the top, the political level, but way down at the bottom so that when the sun publishes some atrocious thing, you know, that people say, well, that's a load of garbage, that just proves that they're not interested in the truth really interested in people buying their newspapers. Absolutely. I could talk about that for a long time, but my final thing, well, first of all, even just going through a trial, I imagine would be very traumatic. Never mind even getting convicted. I think being arrested would be traumatic. You know, so there's so many points in that journey that would be very traumatic, I think. And the last thing I want to touch on is I've heard some people say, well, but it's fine if you're wrongly convicted and you spend time in prison, you get compensation. Well, firstly, to do with that, I think that is absurd, because you could not pay me any amount of money to want to spend a day in prison, never mind, five years, 10 years, whatever. But also, there's a big problem around people actually getting the compensation because going back to Andrew Wilkinson again, he was released from prison in December 2020. And I'm not sure of his current state of affairs now, but I know October last year, he was talking about the fact that was almost three years after release. He was living on benefits because he still didn't have any compensation. So, yes, he's out of prison, but he spent 17 years in prison and then almost three years fighting to get some kind of compensation. So he's still being failed. And I'm sure so many other people are too. So, I mean, the housing problem post prison is an absolute disgrace. And we should all jointly be ashamed of what we're, but no, so, yes, so someone who's going to be rehabilitated because he did commit the crime. What chance has he got if he leaves prison and he's got nowhere to live. He's going to be improved premises, let's say, and then he's going to be kicked out of that and he's homeless. So, what chance has he possibly got worth setting people up to fail because of our lack of housing. But the innocent who come out will come out in a way that's totally changed, totally modified, and you're quite right to say how much money can you pay someone that's suffering from what I would call PTSD. And PTSD, aggravated PTSD, because they're innocent. They've not just been through the, as you say, quite rightly and possible being arrested, then going on trial, all of that stress. I mean, by the way, that stress, to what extent does that allow people that stress to actually state their case in front of a jury, especially if you're innocent because you're completely, your mind is completely bogled by the thing that's come between. So, but then they go into prison and then compensation. I find it very strange we can actually force the accused someone, establish their innocence, and then not immediately pay them a shed load of money enough just to make sure that they are got some degree of independence, because the chance of them getting a job. Malcolm some will probably be able to get paid for doing various things, making a film on things. I don't know what the situation is, but, you know, we've got to think of the people that don't come to the public eye. But I'm not particularly interested that didn't have any money beforehand that I'm particularly bright. I'm so grateful, Danny, for you coming on and chatting, because I think this is such an important topic, because too many people think if you're in prison, you deserve to be there. And there are many people in prison who are innocent, or many people who have spent many years in prison who are later acquitted. So I think it's really important to talk about it. So thank you so much, Danny. I really appreciate your time. I hope you found this conversation informative. I'd be so grateful if you'd quickly read the podcast on whatever platform you listen. It only takes a second, and it helps more people to find the podcast. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
