2010 Miscarriage of Justice day Speech

After receiving many requests for a copy of the speech I gave at this years MOJ day in London, it was suggested that I made it available online. It won’t be word for word because as with any public speech what was written was a guide or template, but it is nonetheless the essence of what was said.

This is obviously a difficult subject for me to speak about, and like I’m sure happens often, this has been written and rewritten many times. I’ve tried to make sure that everything is covered as fully and frankly as possible in the time available, but it’s hard to condense and sometimes the smallest of details make the biggest difference. Many here today know much of what happened to me and my family but some will know only of the sensational headlines and one sided articles, while others know only a little or nothing at all.

On the 20^th of September 2008, my 14 year old niece came to stay over with me, Kareen my then wife and children. It was something she had done many times before, but the first time in about a year after an incident with one of Kareen’s uncles. The police had been called but I had put him out before they arrived and although my niece had been in bed at the time, she had heard everything and was, and still is, extremely scared of him. He was given an order to stay away from us and there hadn’t been any other problems.

Before I got home from work, my niece had called asking if she could go camping with friends instead, but I said I didn’t know them and that if she was supposed to be with us, that’s where she should be. Instead, they decided they would camp in the garden and asked if I would get them some drink. Again I said no but that I would get them 2 small bottles of WKD between the three of them providing they drank them in the house.

Everybody had a good night, the girls later decided it was too cold outside, so I took the tent into the sitting room for a laugh so they could still ‘camp’. Girls being girls, they spoke about boys and during that conversation, one of them said that she didn’t think they found her attractive. Everybody told her she had nothing to worry about but then I made a daft comment, ‘I would be’, Kareen got annoyed, my niece as is her way put her 2 pence in, Kareen left as she did sometimes to calm down, I told my niece she hadn’t helped and she went after Kareen with her friends. It was silly, but that’s all it was.

I’d been up since about 5:30, had done a 12 hour shift, I’d had a couple of drinks, it was about 1:30, I was done in. I figured they were together, and would come back pretty soon so I flopped on the bed, sent a text saying please just come back I love you, and flaked out.

Then I woke up with the fire alarm going off and I could hear James and Christina screaming. There was smoke coming in through a gap above the door and when I opened it, it was thick and dark. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I could just make them out huddled together at the top. I shouted at them, that they had to get out and as I went up, Christina came and passed me but James just stood there, stiff. I went down to put them out, James was clinging tight and wouldn’t slip, I went to go back in, he came back in to. I put him out again, I shouted I’ve got to get Annalise, I’ll be back in a minute and that time I locked the door so he couldn’t come back in again.

By that time, everything was much worse. I went to go back upstairs and I’m not sure how far up I got, must have been near the top but I couldn’t see, couldn’t breath and I knew I wasn’t going to make it, that I needed to get air. I must have stumbled at the bottom of the stairs because I remember having to get up, but I was lost, I couldn’t see and I couldn’t figure out why there was a wall there. Being lost, frightened, terrified is the last I remember until I came around in Aberdeen hospital. That’s when they told me Annalise didn’t make it.

I was in intensive care, I couldn’t speak, the police came to take a statement and I tried but eventually dad said it wasn’t really working so they agreed reluctantly to come back later. They did, I still hadn’t had a chance to take in what had happened but it was still all pretty fuzzy and all I’d been thinking about was Annalise and getting back to Kareen, James and Christina.

It was only after getting back to Shetland that I gave what you would call a proper statement. We spent the following days, muddling through as best we could, trying to keep some sort of routine for James and Christina. At the same time we had to think about Annalise’s funeral, it had to be right, had to be special, it was the last thing we could do for her once she was released.

That’s what we thought was happening when we got the phone call asking us to go into the police station. We went in, got taken to the family suite, sat down and Kareen asked what was going on, was Annalise back. Lynne Falconer who had been the family liaison officer said, we’ll let you know in a minute but first Billy a couple of my colleagues want to have a chat with you. I thought there was something they wanted to ask about but instead I was arrested for murder and attempted murder. I just about collapsed, I was having to hold myself up on the desk when they were reading me my rights but I have no idea if they did it right or not.

And that’s when I began to find out just how corrupt the whole system is, the truth doesn’t matter if it won’t get a conviction and anything else is fair game even if it’s physically impossible.

The interview was horrendous to the point that even hearing it played in court was enough to stop people sleeping. The solicitor they said they would contact wasn’t there but I hadn’t said anything, I thought, I haven’t done anything, you just tell the truth and that’s that. But they weren’t telling the truth, I knew they weren’t and it was such an ordeal that about three hours in, I said right, that’s it I want a solicitor now. “Nuh, this is Scotland, we don’t have to for 6 hours, you’re not getting one”. Stopping and starting, out the back for a ciggy being all nicey, nicey and then back in and bang, why did you kill Annalise. I kept saying, I didn’t, this doesn’t make any sense, why are you doing this to us. We’ve got a very clever man and he’s telling us it was deliberate and you did it.

But the truth is, that was the forth clever man with experience and the first to say it was deliberate. The first had said it was a single fire, under the stairs with extensive heat and smoke damage. The second said there was a single fire, under stairs and that the curtains in the downstairs bedroom were extensively heat damaged. The third said that the curtains were burnt but that it was as a result of the fire under the stairs.

The expert that they were relying on never actually looked at what was claimed to be a paper taper used to set fire to the curtains, he simply entered in his report that he had been told a paper taper had been found. He noted the evidence of burning embers entering the room, but said they would not have ignited the curtains because they hung vertically and that it was only likely on flat surface to something easily ignitable like a piece of paper.

The defence expert did examine the ‘paper taper’ which was in fact an envelope , the burn pattern showed it had not been used as a taper but had instead been laying flat while it burnt. He looked at the printer which sat directly beneath the curtains, and was able to tell from burn marks on it which were the same size and shape that that was where the envelope had been laying while it burnt. It was also the only place where there was any paper ash. The rest isn’t rocket science.

The crowns expert was furious when my QC went to visit him in his office and showed him the photo’s of the scene as it was rather than how it had been when he went. The black soot marks on the wall where the embers had been striking it, the envelope on the printer about an inch beneath the curtains. He was annoyed that he hadn’t been shown and said he would be speaking to officers in Lerwick and would have to change his report. I don’t know if he spoke to them, but he did change his report. He changed ‘only likely’ to ‘also unlikely’. He might be clever, but he is weak and willing to change his opinion of what physical evidence means to suit the outcome the paying party want. And he demonstrated it in court when asked again about the soot marks, hmm, might have been felt tip pen. That’s not an expert, that’s a puppet. The jury left that day and were heard saying ‘I think it must have been the ashtray’.

The ashtray they were speaking about was one that had been carelessly put, rather than carefully placed onto a small set of wooden drawers under the stairs according to the witness and was exactly where the seat of fire was. I’m not going to say who, they know and accepted that they did, that’s their burden but it was an accident.

Like many expert witnesses, the information provided by actual witnesses had to be taken into account, none more so than Christina’s. In fact her evidence as provided to him by the police was relied on in drawing the conclusion that the curtains in the bedroom had burnt first. But he himself had commented in his original report that her remarks and statements were out with her domain to know and that the actions he was told she had done were unreasonable to expect of a 6 year old child in those circumstances. In other words, he did not believe the account he was provided was hers. In his final report those comments were gone and he went on to rely on those remarks, statements and actions to justify his conclusion that the curtains had burnt first.

That statement he was relying on was taken at 2pm the same day. She had been to hospital, she and James had been abducted by the Uncle that my niece was so scared of, she hadn’t slept, she hadn’t eaten and even without all that the fire itself was traumatic enough. Yet she was interviewed, on her own, denied a responsible adult, without video, without tape without even a break for between 5 and 6 hours. The expert also said that her account was the same as James’s. He was interviewed at the same time as Christina but my aunt was with him. His statement was entirely different to hers and almost identical to mine. I saw daddy through the mist, daddy put me outside, daddy went in the house, my house went bang, I love my daddy. The crown refused to admit his statement in the agreed evidence and said we would have to call him as a witness, he was just 4 when the trial was and only 3 at the time so we didn’t want to put him through that.

After I was arrested, Christina had begun to speak with Kareen about the fire a bit more, she was confirming everything I’d said from the beginning. Kareen thought, well that’s it, she phoned the procurator fiscal to tell him. Rather than her opening up helping, the PF then went and spent hours ‘bringing her back to the truth’.  But in court after the prosecution QC finished with his leading yes/no questions, Jack Davidson simply asked her what happened and she told him. You don’t have to bully, manipulate and abuse six year olds to get the truth, you just ask an open question. All she did was tell it as it was and almost single handily destroyed the prosecutions case along with the basis of the expert’s conclusion. For that she was rewarded by being badgered by the prosecution QC but she stayed firm, strong and even let slip that when he’d been asking all his questions there was a lot she was ‘supposed to say’. She had clearly been coached by someone and should never have been put in that position.

Then there is my niece, questioned three times by police in interviews where she describes them as pushy, putting words in her mouth and bullying. She refused to sign the first statement until they’d removed all the bits she hadn’t said and changed the bits she had said to how she had meant it. I think by the second and third statements she’d just had enough and wanted them over with. The PF also tried to get to her on his own through the school, but they insisted he followed procedure. He arranged a meeting at his office instead, where someone from women’s aid was to be as a responsible adult. He sent that the responsible adult out of the room and had his time alone with my niece anyway. She won’t talk about it. * All she will say is, ‘that man is disgusting’ and that ‘he tried to make me think my uncle was a monster.’ * Again, no tapes or videos of any of what she was put through. *

That is the extent that the ‘justice system’ is prepared to go to trying to get a conviction even when it is blatantly obvious that there is no case. Getting social workers to tell a mother who has just tragically lost her 9 month old baby that if she keeps supporting her husband the other two will be put on the child protection list. PF’s travelling 800 miles to ‘happen to be passing the door’, just to see if she’s OK. Promising her everything and telling her things about the case that are factually incorrect just to make her think it’s undeniable, I could go on but there isn’t enough time.

When they offered to drop all the charges and replace them with one charge of culpable homicide with a recommended 6 year sentence I told them they could offer me 3 points on my driving license if they wanted I wasn’t admitting to anything I hadn’t done. They then threw in a charge of sexual abuse against my wife instead but both she and her uncle proved in court it was not physically possible because we were about 60 miles apart at the time and the doctor who examined her testified that there was no physical evidence to support it.

After the fire had been put out a note was found. When Kareen was shown it by police she asked if they thought maybe her uncle had written it to cause trouble. Neighbours did ask my niece to go and get him but she said, ‘I’m not going there, that man’s a F’ing nutter’. Someone did get him, he was there, and he was certainly causing trouble. It’s littered through all of the statements starting before even Annalise and myself had been found. The paper it was written on couldn’t be linked to any paper in the house, it didn’t have either my fingerprints or DNA on it. It was pristine clean, and found in an area everyone and their dog had been trampling through and read ‘I tried to warn you about uncle x, lying bastard’. I don’t think that note was there to cause trouble, I think it was there as it says, to warn of it.

The not proven verdict, I have been disappointed by that, particularly since it took the judge so long to consider the submission  of no case to answer. But I think juries have a difficult job interpreting the directions. Consider this one, “if you think the crown has not proven that the fire was deliberate you must acquit.” It took them just 2 hours.

Lies, manipulation of witnesses, including expert witnesses, denying legal aid funding, no accountability, abusing child and vulnerable witnesses. * Those are the things that are important as we come together on days like today, to stand United Against Injustice. Not bickering over who’s connected with a case you wanted your name on, not publicly aired differences of opinion or personal attacks. If we divide ourselves, then the justice system doesn’t have to and the general public we need the support of will turn and run a mile the other way. Lets keep things in perspective and concentrate on helping every man, woman and child suffering injustice and abuse at the hands of the very system supposed to deliver the opposite.

When I was released I was determined not to be angry and bitter, so I decided to try and do something to help people who are wrongly accused and their families. I set up wronglyaccusedperson.org.uk which has in some ways been a victim of it’s own success, the demand is simply overwhelming. It has had over 1 million hits and I receive hundreds of e-mails and calls every week, the extent of the problem is massive. I have been working hard on trying to get funding together, so I can set up a network of counsellors for victims of miscarriages of justice and their families who also suffer. I want a network of counsellors for the child and vulnerable witnesses who suffer the effects of what they are put through long after any case has ended, left to cope without any proper support. I want a fund so that people can have the tests they need done done when legal aid is denied and they can’t afford it themselves. I know it’s big, but I am determined, and I won’t be scared off by anyone.

* The transcript of the speech has been ammended as it refers to sensitive information post trial 03/02/2011  15:02.