First Miscarriage of Justice

Jon Robins

Description

The story of Tony Stock is astonishing: deeply disturbing it sent out ripples of disquiet when he was sentenced to ten years for robbery at Leeds Assizes in 1970. Over the next 40 years the case went to the Court of Appeal four times and has the distinction of being the first to have been referred to that court twice by the Criminal Cases Review Commission

Sujets

• True crime

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 20 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908162793
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The First Miscarriage of Justice
The ‘Amazing and Unreported’ Case of Tony Stock
Jon Robins
With a Foreword by Michael Mansfield QC
Copyright and publication details
The First Miscarriage of Justice
The ‘Amazing and Unreported’ Case of Tony Stock
by Jon Robins
ISBN 978-1-909976-12-2 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-908162-79-3 (Epub ebook)
ISBN 978-1-908162-80-9 (Adobe ebook)
Copyright © 2014 This work is the copyright of Jon Robins. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by him in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, or in any language, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide. The Foreword is the copyright of Michael Mansfield QC © 2014.
Cover design © 2014 Waterside Press. Design by www.gibgob.com .
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH . Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] ; www.gardners.com
North American distribution Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail]
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
Printed by CPI Group, Chippenham, UK.
e-book The First Miscarriage of Justice is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Myilibrary, Dawsonera, ebrary, and Ebscohost.
Published 2014 by
Waterside Press
Sherfield Gables
Sherfield-on-Loddon
Hook, Hampshire
United Kingdom RG27 0JG
Telephone [phone]
E-mail [e-mail]
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Table of Contents
Arrest photo of Tony Stock
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Author of the Foreword
Foreword by Michael Mansfield QC
Dedication
The Identikit image of Tony Stock
Introduction ‘Just another robbery by a bunch of third-rate criminals’
The Merrion Centre …
78 Birkdale Road, Stockton-on-Tees …
Saturday, January 24: the first 24 hours
Why Tony Stock?
Who was Tony Stock? How Do You Prove a Negative?
1. The investigation
2. Regina v Anthony Stock
3. Proving a negative
4. The verdict ‘His word against mine’
The world pre-PACE
A splendid type of officer
Mr Verbal
Force with a record
‘A Knock on the Door — and Mr Stock gets 10 years’ Prisoner Number 650603
A battle for JUSTICE
‘So easy for people to be genuinely mistaken’
‘Primed to explode’
Going to Strasbourg
Not another morsel
‘A nasty taste’ Chainsaws and Supergrasses
Operation Ohio
Fresh start
Going down
The rise and fall of the supergrass
Making war on society
Another piece of work
‘Squealer clears Identikit victim’ Degrees of Innocence
It could happen to anyone
Re-enactment and reconstruction
Just a formality Don’t Quit
Another fresh start
A double miscarriage of justice
Supergrass speaks
Don’t quit
I take all the casualties A Fantastic Hypothesis
Appalling vista
‘If only I was Black or Irish …’
Supergrass surfaces
Wasting the court’s time
Making things fit?
‘Time heals all wounds — but not for my Dad’
Home and dry
‘I want to be here like I want a hole in my head’
‘A series of assumptions which makes scant sense’
‘A series of assumptions
A glimmer of hope
Thinking positive again The Unattainable Truth
The nationalisation of zeal
Back of the queue
Return of the Thursday Gang
Trip down memory lane
The truth remains hidden
‘A matter of conjecture’
The second Ford Cortina
Tony Stock and the Thursday Gang
Questions asked and not asked
The five photographs
A last minute change of heart
Second guessing the courts Judges in the Spotlight
Watchdog or gatekeeper?
Hanging on a thread
‘A ticking-off’
‘The first miscarriage’
‘Regulated from a spirit of underlying hostility’
Playing it safe
Going nowhere
One more time
Judges under scrutiny
‘Defying gravity’ Unfinished Business
Index
Arrest photo of Tony Stock.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to those who have written for and supported www.­thejusticegap.com since the site launched in October 2011 — in particular those who contributed to two collections of essays, Wrongly Accused: who is responsible for investigating miscarriages of justice? and No Defence: lawyers and miscarriages of justice . A heartfelt ‘thank you’ to all those people who were interviewed for, or otherwise helped with, the writing of this book over the last two years.
Special thanks to Glyn Maddocks and Ralph Barrington. Glyn has been Tony Stock’s solicitor since the early-1990s and, since then, has fought tirelessly to clear his former client’s name. Ralph was investigation adviser at the Criminal Cases Review Commission. He felt so strongly about what he has called ‘a self-evident injustice’ that he decided to pursue the case after he retired from the Commission after 13 years. I talk about their involvement in the case in Chapter 11 .
Both Glyn and Ralph have been very generous with their time and expertise whilst I was writing the book.
I am also grateful to Tony Stock’s family for their help, support and time — in particular Tony’s brother Alan and his wife Carolyn, his children Antoinette, Steve and James.
Finally, I would like to thank my own family for their love and support: my parents — Chris and Margaret — my wife, Juliet and the girls, Bea and Eve.
Jon Robins
September 2014
About the Author
Jon Robins is a journalist. He has been writing about law and justice for the national and specialist press for 15 years. He has written about the Stock case for The Times, Guardian and others. He is a visiting senior fellow in access to justice at the University of Lincoln, a patron of Hackney Community Law Centre and founder of www.thejusticegap.com (an online magazine about law and justice).
About the Author of the Foreword
Michael Mansfield QC is one of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers. Called to the Bar in 1967, he established Tooks Court Chambers in 1984 and took silk in 1989. In 2014 he launched Mansfield Chambers in response to increasing cuts to legal aid. He is the president of Amicus, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers and the National Civil Rights Movement and author of Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer (Bloomsbury, 2010), The Home Lawyer (Atlantic Books, 2003) and Presumed Guilty (Heinemann, 1993). Michael Mansfield is a visiting professor at Birkbeck School of Law, a professor of law at City University and an honorary fellow at Kent University.
Foreword by Michael Mansfield QC
The importance of this relatively unknown case for the public is that it should be recognised and heeded for what it is: not just a massive blot on the judicial landscape but a blot which has haemorrhaged to become the landscape itself.
The story of Tony Stock should be mandatory reading for everyone, not merely those involved with the law, whether they be students, practising lawyers, teachers, and judges. It concerns the quality of our criminal justice system and its serious reluctance and unwillingness to root out injustice.
It cannot be read in isolation because there are forces outside the system that have been steadily eroding the basic principles despite the notorious miscarriage cases of the 1980s. Successive governments have been removing basic protections — the right to silence, evidential provisions relating to corroboration, hearsay, and previous convictions, placing a premium on pleading guilty and most fundamentally determined attempts to curtail the right to jury trial itself.
These initiatives have been reinforced by regular political attacks on the system. Infamously, the most vitriolic came from Tony Blair under the guise of ‘rebalancing the criminal justice system’ in 2006 when he attributed the demise of the social fabric of our society to the system. More recently it has taken the form of assault on human rights legislation and the European Court of Human Rights. The Tories are now openly floating the idea of withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights despite their apparent support for it in the Coalition Agreement after the last election. Those in the vanguard of this movement are surprisingly the very guardians of the system, the home and justice secretaries.
But the final straw has been the cuts to public funding and especially to legal aid, a process started by a Labour government and relished by the Coalition. They have hit the most vulnerable in our community and some areas of need are excluded altogether. As a result there is an increased risk of injustice. Thorough preparation research and dedicated representation are dwindling fast as corners are cut to suit impossible budgets.
As ever it’s one law for the rich and another for the poor.
Tony Stock’s story, told so vividly and compellingly by Jon Robins, is one that has a particular resonance for me. The whole case, from 1970 to Tony’s death in 2012, covers most of my working lifetime at the Bar. ‘I would have been the first of the miscarriages of justice,’ Tony Stock has said in the quote from which the book takes its name. Tony then mentions a run of appeals (the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and Cardiff Three) in which I appeared. Many other similar appeals in which I was involved are cited by Jon Robins in the course of the book and, of course, I represented Tony himself during his battles in the Court of Appeal.
The case against Tony Stock was paper thin as is made clarion clear in this book. But whatever there was at the start was reduced to rubble over the course of four appeals. The revelations about the use of photographs seriously undermined the reliability of identification evidence, the original confrontation breached numerous procedural rules, disputed and improbable oral a