The working class academic fighting to overturn wrongful convictions
Photographer: Paco Mayoral
At 14, Michael Naughton’s dad set him an ultimatum which would be a defining moment in his life until he met his wife ten years later: either win a fight against the boy who roughed him up earlier that day – or sleep in the outside toilet.
Heeding his dad, Michael headbutted and kicked to settle the score against the older boy with bigger fists. “I battered him,” he recalls. The two fathers – patrons of the same local pub – watched on in the front yard.
By 19, he was a mechanical engineer and foreman at a factory of 750 men. By 31, he was off the job with workplace injuries, like so many in his line of work. With three slipped disks and no academic qualifications to his name, Michael seized an opportunity to retrain at the University of Bristol (UoB), thanks to an entry programme for working class and disabled applicants.
Speaking to Michael, you can understand how he ended up an adversarial and campaigning academic. Now a doctor and Reader in Sociology and Law at the UoB, he has consulted with MPs, lectured conferences globally, and is an expert in miscarriages of justice. But one of his greatest achievements is founding the Innocence Network in 2004 to investigate alleged wrongful convictions – it would also earn him the most flack.
Confessions vs evidence
Simon Hall, imprisoned for the vicious murder of 79-year-old Joan Albert, was one of the Innocence Network’s biggest cases, but would also precipitate its downfall. After a failed appeal and years of painstaking research on his case by Michael and a team of law students, Hall confessed his guilt in 2013 and killed himself the next year. Michael was devastated and the Innocence Network was shaken to its core.
The UoB flagship project had, under Michael’s directorship, established a UK-wide network of 36 universities to investigate miscarriages of justice pro-bono. But suddenly under the spotlight, some of its backers got cold feet. Had a well-intentioned team of law students and academics been hoodwinked by a murderer?
“The fibres were different lengths, different shapes, different thicknesses and different colours. They were not the same.”
Michael naughton
Michael was not convinced, though even Hall’s widow who had campaigned for her husband’s release, eventually believed he had carried out the murder. Michael reels out examples of cases in which prisoners confessed to crimes they did not commit. “The Birmingham Six confessed. The Guildford Four confessed. Simon was on suicide watch and he was taking every drug he could get.”
Only one piece of direct evidence tied Hall to the murder, says Michael. The fibres found on Joan Albert’s body were said to be ‘indistinguishable’ from those found in his car and flat by a forensic scientist. And the jury convicted.
But an independent forensic scientist commissioned by Michael found that the ‘indistinguishable’ fibres were some of the most common in the world. “It’s in police officer uniforms, it’s in laptops, it’s in the dashboard of your car, it’s in the shirt I’m wearing now,” he says.
“The fibres were different lengths, different shapes, different thicknesses and different colours. They were not the same.”
Also, the team of students made a startling discovery before Hall’s confession. A DNA profile from the murder weapon had not been disclosed at trial. “I knew this was dynamite,” Michael recounts excitedly.
“I was buzzing and couldn’t sleep for three days. We knew that we were absolutely onto this.”
“A numpty”
In 2007, years before these findings and Hall’s failed appeal, the BBC’s Rough Justice had him on to discuss the case . Another talking head was a man by the name of Keir Starmer, a defence barrister at Doughty Street Chambers.
At a preview screening, Naughton took offence at the future Labour leader’s defence of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) and called him “a numpty”. Michael believed that the miscarriages watchdog, which screens requests to the Court of Appeal, was warding off challenges to convictions. He feared Hall’s case wouldn’t get a hearing before the Court of Appeal. “I got up and walked off to the nearest pub…and I was proved right.”
Hall’s appeal was rejected on the grounds that, although the fibre forensics didn’t match, his original team could have made the defence at trial. It therefore wasn’t deemed ‘fresh evidence’, despite no forensic scientists being called by his defence team in court.
As for the DNA profile on the knife, the appeal lawyers never had the DNA developed to prove a mismatch or otherwise, an exasperated Michael explains. But the mismatch had been cursorily referenced, and therefore could not be used in future appeals because, again, it wouldn’t constitute ‘fresh evidence’. All doors of appeal were closed to Hall, in the rigid framework of the miscarriages watchdog, and Michael’s buzzing excitement turned into disappointment.
The Innocence Network couldn’t hide from the fact that its record for overturning convictions was slim from 2005-2014: only one murder conviction overturned, by the Cardiff University team.
There was no hiding from it, it was an immensely ambitious endeavour which required specialist investigators and huge resources, not just academics and volunteer law students working nights on a skeleton budget.
Regardless, the Bristol team was inundated with requests for help, acting almost as a ‘sorting office’, pushing cases to teams across 36 universities. Michael feared that the project had strayed from its roots and accused some of not taking the responsibility seriously.
“I couldn’t in good faith keep on sending cases out to universities that are just going to play about with it…let them learn about an alleged claim of innocence…give them a good grade, have a pint, talk about how bad everything is and then they move on.”
In 2014 Michael disbanded the umbrella group Innocence Network UK. But it had already exposed that the CCRC was not fit for purpose.
Over the last decade, the miscarriages watchdog has referred less than 1% of cases for fresh appeals. A dysfunctional CCRC should trouble us all, says Michael.
Systemic overhaul
Now, Michael and a small team at Bristol University are preparing to launch a slimmer and more focused project, taking lessons from the trials of its previous incarnation.
Empowering the Innocent is a targeted campaign calling for the urgent reform of the CCRC. “Miscarriages of justice are not rare and exceptional,” Michael says. There is a need for a systemic overhaul of the watchdog which is supposed to serve as a safety net for the wrongly convicted.
The team hopes to review a small number of cases that have been rejected for appeal by the CCRC. And in doing so, demonstrate that the grounds by which the watchdog determines the fate of a prisoner to challenge their conviction, are deeply flawed and unjust. “We might not overturn these cases, but we will show what the fault lines are.”
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Interesting article about a truly problematic structure within the legal system. I was with Michael at the High Court in London when Hall’s appeal case was rejected by Lord Judge (yes, there is a judge called Lord Judge). Any competent reading of the evidence against Hall or subsequent investigation of the evidence which was “not investigated or presented” leads to the conclusion that the conviction was deeply unsafe. I was staggered by hearing Lord Judge say that the case remained ‘compelling’ when the sole foundation of conviction, the fibre evidence, had been demonstrated not just to be inaccurate but scientifically factually wrong. There can be no sustainable intellectual support for an appeal system that acts in this manner. Even for a man of Michael Naughton’s strength and determination, that judgement spoke to a certain futility in challenging the process. Change can only come when honesty of purpose and the integrity Michael possesses are sitting on the bench.
Congratulations on this well-written article Bristol Cable,
I hope the changes Jack Adams speaks of in the comments, come soon, we need them to so badly…alongside somehow, someway changing public perception of wrongful convictions too. Sadly they occur far, far more frequently than anyone could ever imagine. Victims of wrongful convictions and their families face the fight of their lives+tragically too many times it takes all of someone`s life or worse. As Jack also points out, at times it all seems so futile, but knowing there are people like Dr. Naughton (and others with his same fight and dedication) and Empowering The Innocent in the arena, who are completely authentic and who only want truth, justice and transparency, means a lot because it`s all any genuine victims of wrongful convictions yearn for too.
Ps I meant to say “Freedom for Robin Garbutt” X
The absurd requirement for ‘fresh evidence’ (which seems to have appeared out of the blue; I cannot find the origins of this requirement at all -it is certainly in contradiction to the recommendations of the 1993 Royal Commission) is a complete anathema to true justice. The CCRC, far from being independent is a mere lap-dog to the Court of Appeal and is indeed unfit for purpose. The abysmal numbers of cases sent to the C of A attest to that.
The whole appeal system if failing the wrongly convicted and urgently requires a major overhaul.
What an interesting article, thank you for writing this.
In the mists of time (70s/80s) we all understood that our courts can get things wrong…sometimes on a big scale. We remember the Birmingham 6, Maguire7, the Guildford 4. Unfortunately, the investigative journalism that helped to uncover these and other wrongful convictions has all but died…it has handed over its baton to the system that convicted these innocent people. They have left it to the CCRC, the new saviour of the wrongly convicted.
Sadly, the CCRC has become a toothless tiger. They appear to the public to be a strong arm for justice. Instead, they seem to shadow the very justice system they were set up to be independent of.
Truth and justice should be the goal, seeking out the truth, not looking at the legal case and saying ‘that isn’t new evidence’. Twenty, thirty years on from a bad conviction, how is a person to find ‘new evidence’? Especially if no crime actually took place, as sometimes happens.
Fighting for innocent people…against a flawed justice system should not fall to a few members of the public. Personally, I’ve been working alongside others for more than twenty years, highlighting cases that need to be looked at and hopefully overturned, and supporting those hurt and damaged families. Working in this way opens one up to trolls, and to ridicule, but we who take this on feel we have to do it. An innocent in prison means another attacker/murderer left in the community.
My own brother was a miscarriage of justice, which is how I became involved. He was wrongly convicted of the 1999 murder of Jill Dando. We fought, he is out…though very damaged by his experience, as are his family.
A justice system should aim to correct its mistakes, not bury them in jargon and innuendo. My book, Stand Against Injustice, with a foreword from Dr Ml Naughton, will illuminate the wrongs, how they occur and the impact on the families, and wider communities of the wrongfully convicted person. Let me assure you, fighting a broken institution, our own justice system, to obtain justice is exhausting, and many families are doing this every day of their lives.