In the Name of the Law by David Rose

reviewed by Andrew Green

A British police officer on duty is hacked to death with 54 stab wounds in the midst of a crowd.  A well-resourced, meticulous police inquiry, is led by a Metropolitan Police Commander who decides to charge only those seen to be involved by at least two eyewitnesses who are prepared to give evidence. The police find such evidence against nine suspects, but the Crown Prosecution Service decides that a trial would not be in the public interest, and the charges are dropped. The decision was made in 1994. The officer's killing took place in 1985, on the Broadwater Farm Estate in north London, and his name was PC Blakelock. 

Yes, this is the same case in which three men from Tottenham were fitted up for murder. One of the three was Winston Silcott, convicted on admissions he was supposed to have made to Detective Chief Inspector Maxwell Dingle and Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Melvin. Scientific (ESDA) tests showed they had destroyed the original interview notes and substituted their own version. Winston's conviction and those of his co-accused were overturned by the appeal court.  Blakelock's family and his fellow officers were furious that no one stood convicted of the murder.

A fresh inquiry was set up. Melvin had always made out that his original inquiry was frustrated by the non-co-operation of the inhabitants of Broadwater Farm, a version of events until now universally accepted, if only because no one could really expect Broadwater Farm residents to co-operate with aggressive, racist local police.  But by using less confrontational methods, Commander Nove achieved the impressive results mentioned above.  But before he could bring his nine suspects to trial, Melvin and Dingle were themselves put on trial for perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by forging the notes of Winston's interview.  Their leading counsel, Richard Ferguson QC, in a preamble which introduced the defence case, gave excerpts from 14 witness statements, which he said indicated that Winston had been guilty all along.  But, he said, the witnesses dared not give oral evidence ‘through fear’. 

If the nine new suspects discovered by the Nove investigation were to go on trial, it would become blatantly obvious that Winston Silcott had nothing to do with the death of PC Blakelock, and so Melvin and Dingle really had made up the note of Winston’s ‘admissions’.  And so, rather than admit that some of the most senior officers of Scotland Yard concocted evidence, the CPS is willing to let nine people it could convict of hacking a police officer to death, go free.   This is what the CPS calls acting in the public interest.David Rose’s revelation of what happened to the Blakelock reinvestigation is one of several examples in this book of investigative journalism at its best - going beyond shock-horror exposés of scandals to ferret out precisely what happened in cases and to build a complex picture of policing and criminal justice in the mid 90s.  Conflicts between police, lawyers and politicians give rise to numerous contradictions, and Rose does not try to hide or resolve them. 

Rough justice

The book is about ‘the collapse of criminal justice’, as its subtitle puts it.  It is not the institution of criminal investigation and legal process that is collapsing - that remains all too solid and threatening - but the ‘justice’ part. Rose’s thesis appears to be that until the exposure of major miscarriages of justice started in 1989 (with the quashing of the Guildford Four’s convictions), an ‘old regime’ held sway, in which police malpractice was supported and reinforced by lawyers and courts. 

This was a kind of rough justice, nauseatingly termed 'noble cause corruption' by smoothie Paul Condon, Commissioner of the Met.  Supposedly, police officers frustrated by legal restrictions derived from suspects' rights imposed by soft politicians influenced by leftie civil liberties campaigners, could only secure convictions against suspects they believed to be guilty by fitting them up.  Major miscarriages of justice resulted.

Rose argues fitting up was (and is still) a response to serious (and worsening) problems faced by the police: that crime is increasing, and that its causes, such as racism and social deprivation, are beyond the control of the police. At the same time, the number of convictions is falling, partly because of restrictions on the police imposed by legal regulations, but also because the CPS is failing to prosecute in many cases in which the police think they would obtain convictions. 

The police are pushed instead to deal with 'organised crime' through 'pro- active' methods. This consists largely of using paid informers. (Chapter 5 contains very interesting accounts of police allowing criminals to get away with major crimes as long as they give evidence against someone else - no doubt all too familiar to many of our readers; it includes the story of how police conned American Express into paying for a printing press to forge American Express cheques in order to trap a couple of otherwise innocent people.)

Payoffs

Rose also cites cases in which judges give in to apparently outrageous defence demands so that prosecutions are stalled, and police fail to pursue obvious lines of inquiry and appear to ignore obvious suspects against whom they could build convincing cases. Such instances will appear strange to readers who have heard judges refuse very reasonable requests made in the course of their own defences, and who were very unlikely suspects for the offences of which they stand convicted.  And yet this favouritism towards likely suspects is also only too familiar: it is the same treatment given to the grasses who are the shadowy figures lurking behind many cases of wrongful conviction, criminals guilty of the most serious crimes who are protected by police, permitted (if not required) to continue their criminal activities, and given large cash rewards - in return for what?  Just for passing on information?  Or for helping to fit up others?  Or are we looking at something more sinister? Freemasonry? Pay-offs?  And if so, who are the beneficiaries of crime?  Police officers?  Lawyers? Judges? We are ready to accept such corruption when we read about it in third world countries, or Italy, or the United States, or Belgium. Is Britain really so superior?

No doubt Barbara Mills's CPS is as badly run as Rose says it is.  But every time we see it wasting money on the prosecution of a poor case, or saving money by letting villains walk, we have to ask who benefits.  Villains, of course; police who simultaneously clear up crime and protect grasses who are (necessarily) active criminals; and the state, which condones and enables all this activity, and reaps its rewards by displaying its ability to clear up serious crime even as it preserves the crime that makes its existence necessary. If the criminal justice system protects criminals and preserves crime, then Rose's thesis no longer stands up.  The brutal and prolonged racist attacks he describes happen not because police lack resources to prevent them, but because racist thugs know that if police intervene, it will be to further punish the victims.  People are fitted up not because police have acted on mistaken hunches and cut corners or gilded lilies, but in order to protect grasses and clear up serious crime that would not have happened if their own grasses had not been involved.