Back in 1993, The United States SCOTUS ruled on Herrera v. Collins. "The issue in that case was whether an inmate could present new evidence to make a claim of habeas corpus, the ancient legal vehicle by which prisoners can seek relief from unlawful imprisonment."
Nine years after his conviction for shooting and killing two police officers, Herrera produced writs stating that he was innocent, and that his deceased brother had actually committed the murders. Herrera's last-ditch effort failed, but his case was then used by the Supreme Court in order to decide whether any inmate could use claims of new evidence to argue that their imprisonment violated their Constitutional rights. They decided no. In other words, a claim of innocence based on newly discovered evidence — according to this decision — didn't provide grounds for habeas corpus relief.
Scalia concurred with the court's 6-3 decision that a claim of innocence should not serve as the sole grounds for habeas corpus relief, stating in his written opinion that sufficient legal relief already existed for people presenting new evidence of innocence (to be fair, Scalia also said 'not that factual innocence was irrelevant') and "that ruling otherwise would impose an unmanageable burden on lower courts to review newly discovered evidence." (LINK)
ME - Which seems to be basically saying, it would be too damned much trouble and costs too much money to check one more time before executing someone to see if they are indeed factually innocent. Which is where I blow a gasket and start screaming.
Lest you think this is a problem solely in the United States, Lord Denning, the most celebrated English judge of the twentieth century, said in 1988, “It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than that the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned.” Denning was discussing the Birmingham Six, a group of Irishmen who were convicted of bombing two pubs and then spent more than a decade protesting their innocence. The Court of Appeal had dismissed their case, and Denning himself had thrown out allegations of police corruption, because even the idea of the police could be corrupt was “such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right.” (More screaming from me.) After activists and journalists took up the issue, Denning complained that it would have been better if the men had all been hanged. “They’d have been forgotten and the whole community would be satisfied,” he said. (New Yorker)
Anyway, it turned out that the police had been corrupt and fabricated evidence against the Birmingham Six. They were finally freed in 1991. Their case was one of several – the Tottenham Three, the Bridgewater Four, the Maguire Seven - in the eighties and nineties that eroded faith in the British justice system.
As a public outcry grew over wrongful convictions, the Criminal Cases Review Commission was formed and started operating in 1997. The CCRC was designed as an independent check on the Court of Appeal, but it was never given full freedom. It was allowed to refer cases only if there was a “real possibility” that the Court of Appeal would overturn them, and defining that limited the cases severely.
In 2021, a cross-party inquiry issued a damning report, concluding that the CCRC was “too deferential to the Court of Appeal.” Wrongful convictions in the U.K. were repeatedly traced to failures by police or prosecutors to hand evidence over to the defense (see, it doesn't just happen here), but the CCRC didn't look into it very often, and its work was 'routinely hampered by officers’ destruction of forensic evidence.'
A classic example of police 'officers’ destruction of forensic evidence' is the Whitehouse Farm murders, "The U.K.'s Most Infamous Family Massacre".
Late at night on August 7, 1985, Jeremy Bamber called the police to Whitehouse Farm, where they found Jeremy's parents, Nevill and June Bamber, his sister Sheila and her six year old twins all shot to death in different rooms of the house.
At first everyone believed it was Shiela, diagnosed with schizophrenia and was often threatening, who'd shot everyone and then herself. But then other things came up.
Like the police.
Detective Inspector Ron Cook, the lead crime-scene officer, was known as "Bumbling Ron." The night of the murder he picked up the Bible that was either on Sheila's body or by her side - no one will ever know for sure - and started flipping through it. Without wearing gloves. He also moved the murder weapon without wearing gloves, and no one checked for fingerprints until weeks later. And he actively disposed of bloody carpets and bedding. Cook died several years ago, but his deputy, Detective Sergeant Neil Davidson, revealed that after Bamber was declared the prime suspect, “The shit hit the fan, big time."
“ ‘What can we salvage? Who can we blame?’ ” Cook spent weeks “chasing about, red in the face,” trying to find scraps of evidence, Davidson told me. “He was trying to dig himself out of the hole. The whole forensic thing was really a shambles, because nothing was preserved.” Watching the chaos unfold had left him conflicted about the case. “I would not be surprised if, one day, someone comes along and says, Here’s definitive proof that he didn’t do it.”
And then there's the crime-scene photographs, including ones which were not made available to the original defence. Let's just say that in these photographs, dead bodies move and things come and go. Some show Sheila's right arm and hand in slightly different positions in relation to the rifle, which is lying across her body. The rifle itself also appears to have moved, more than once. (I think Bumbling Ron probably struck again.) Former DCS Mick Gradwell, shown the photographs by The Guardian, said in 2011: "The evidence shows, or portrays, Essex police having damaged the scene, and then having staged it again to make it look like it was originally. And if that has happened, and that hasn't been disclosed, that is really, really serious."
Much of the trial revolved around a silencer, which had been photographed (?) on the rifle. Somehow the police failed to secure it at the time, and it vanished. But then 3 days later, David Boutflour, Jeremy's cousin, found it in the gun cupboard and took it home, where he and his parents, etc, handled it freely for three days before giving it to the police. Boutflour said it felt sticky, and they found red paint and blood on the silencer. When the police did collect the silencer on August 12, five days after the murders, an officer reported seeing an inch-long grey hair attached to it, but this disappeared by the time the silencer arrived at forensics. There a scientist, John Hayward, found blood on the inside and outside surface of the silencer, but not enough to permit analysis. Later, the blood inside was found to be the same blood group as Sheila's, although it also could have been a mixture of Nevill's and June's – or David Boutflour's.
Speaking of David Boutflour, there was a second silencer, identical to the first, which was his. The police eventually took that one away too, which didn't just muddle the waters, it pretty much turned them to sludge. To this day, no one knows which silencer was actually tested, or both. There are three exhibits, titled "SBJ/1", (because it was handed over by Detective Sergeant Stan Jones), "DB/1" after David Boutflour had found it, and another labeled "DRB/1" because there was also a Detective Constable David Bird. Which what where? No one knows.
BTW, the whole point of the silencer – and it was the major point of the prosecution - was that the rifle was short enough that Sheila, who was also short, could not have killed herself with the rifle if the silencer was on it. So, my question: If the silencer was on the rifle, why were they looking for it in the guncase? Why are there pictures with the silencer and without it? And how did Boutflour find the silencer (a silencer) there 3 days later?
NOTE: David Boutflour's family inherited Whitehouse Farm after Bamber was convicted.
But details, details. The prosecution argued that if Sheila's blood was inside the silencer, it supported the prosecution's position that she had been shot by another party, but if the blood inside the silencer belonged to someone else (and later tests indicated that it was her mother June's), that part of the prosecution case collapsed.
NOTE: Bamber's defence brought this up in an appeal after later tests indicated it was probably Sheila's mother June's blood. "The judges' conclusion was that the results were complex, incomplete, and also meaningless because they did not establish how June's DNA came to be in the silencer years after the trial, did not establish that Sheila's was not in it, and did not lead to a conclusion that Jeremy's conviction was unsafe." (Wikipedia) In other words, screw you, we're sticking with our decision.
More cock-ups: Officers did not take contemporaneous notes; those who had dealt with Jeremy wrote down their statements weeks later.
Ten years later, all blood samples were destroyed.
Oh, and there's Jeremy's girlfriend Julia Mugford, with whom he'd broken up before the murders. She said that he'd planned and done the murders. The police promptly arrested him, and at the station, Bamber insisted that Mugford had invented the story after he broke off their relationship. “If she could put me behind bars then nobody else could have me,” he said. (Apparently she also tried to kill him at one point, literally telling him, "If you're dead, no one else can have you!")
About a month after the murders, Mugford testified against Bamber. Later, during appeals, Jeremy's lawyers argued that a 26 September 1985 letter to Mugford from John Walker, assistant director of public prosecutions, raised the possibility that she had been persuaded to testify in the hope that charges against her would not be pursued. You see, during her police invterviews, Mugford had confessed to drug offences, burglary, and cheque fraud, and in the letter, Walker had suggested to the Chief Constable of Essex Police, "with considerable hesitation", that Mugford not be prosecuted for any of it.
Also, after Bamber's conviction, Mugford sold her story, complete with semi-nude photos, to a tabloid and got enough "blood money" as she called it, "to buy a flat."
Despite all of this and more, Bamber was convicted and sentenced to five life terms. He's been appealing ever since, based on the unbelievable incompetence and general 'mucking about' of the police – and so far the CCRC has rejected all appeals.
In July 2025, the CCRC announced that they had reviewed four of Bamber's latest ten grounds for appeal and had decided they should not be referred to the court of appeal. The other six grounds remain under review… But I wouldn't hold my breath.
'Michael Naughton, a scholar of sociology and law at the University of Bristol, said that the C.C.R.C. had come to serve the opposite of its intended purpose—it was effectively insuring “that miscarriages of justice don’t come to public attention, because they diminish confidence and trust in the criminal-justice system.” In 2004, Naughton began launching innocence projects at universities across the U.K., emulating a movement that has exonerated hundreds of convicts in the United States. The network closed down after eleven years, having overturned just one conviction. “People tend to say terrible things about America, but they have this real commitment to innocent people not being convicted,” Naughton said. “We don’t have that focus on innocence in this country.”' (My emphasis added.)
Sources: (The Guardian, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Wikipedia Jeremy Bamber)
I've sat in at a lot of parole hearings to testify on the behalf of inmates. All too often, the State's Attorney of the case shows up, claims they're not there to relitigate the case, and then promptly relitigate the case with a venom that has to be heard to be believed. Most of them simply don't want any inmate who was convicted under their watch to get out. Even if they might be innocent.
And I've seen inmates who have been granted commutations linger for years in limbo, waiting for the Governor to sign the commutation papers. Again, even if they might be innocent.
Is the majesty of the law more important than the accuracy of the law?
As a human being, I would reply "NO" to all three of those questions.
But, "The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy."
