Rush to Judgment



Daniel Finkelstein writing in The Times makes a powerful case against the police and the courts 'rushing to judgment' in dealing with high profile, controversial crimes.

In doing so, the Fink also provides the best possible reason for abolishing the death penalty because if this had been in place at the time of the Guildford Four, then the state would have taken the lives of at least four innocent people.  

How hysteria can cheat us all out of justice

By Daniel Finkelstein - The Times

Fear lies behind some of the worst miscarriages of justice. In the current climate, are we in danger of forgetting that?

A quarter of a century ago, a little more actually, in another life, I appeared at the Irish centre in Kilburn, northwest London, and debated against Ken Livingstone. I was a parliamentary candidate at 24 years of age and a mile out of my depth. Though of course I didn’t realise it, then. One rarely does.

When we had finished speaking, someone asked us about the Guildford Four, still then in jail for a pub bombing that had taken place in the mid-1970s. Ken proclaimed their innocence. I responded that, whatever the merits of the case, it wasn’t for politicians to question the judgment of courts.

At the time, and for a while afterwards, I was quite pleased with my answer. This despite the fact that immediately after I sat down, a woman got up, announced that Paul Hill, one of the wrongly imprisoned men, was her son, and spoke passionately and brilliantly about the injustice.

But now? In the days after the death of the innocent Gerry Conlon, I think that while in 25 years I have said many naive and stupid things, if I could only take back one of them, this would probably be it.

To understand why I feel that way, consider another story that, by pure chance, broke on the same day that Conlon’s death was announced. It was that compensation had finally been paid to five of the young New Yorkers who had been convicted in 1990 of the assault and rape of a jogger.

On April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili, a young woman working for a Wall Street investment bank, was attacked and raped in Central Park. She was so badly beaten that she almost died and cannot, even now, remember anything about the attack. The case became famous internationally as a symbol of urban crime, of the dangers of New York in particular, and of racial tensions.

Almost immediately, suspicion fell on a group of young African-Americans and Hispanics who had been roaming the park that night. The first paragraph of the very first Central Park jogger story in The New York Times talked of “an attack by as many as 12 youths”, a theme taken up in all the stories that followed. The police were quoted from the beginning talking about “a group” of attackers. By April 22 a new word, “wilding”, had been coined to describe the assailants’ behaviour that night.

It didn’t take long for there to be arrests and, after many hours of interrogation, confessions. Even though the confessions were confused and contradictory, accounts of the jury deliberations make clear that they were central to obtaining the convictions.

The confessions, however, were misleading. As was the entire story of how Ms Meili had been attacked. More than a decade after the original court case, a man called Matias Reyes pleaded guilty to murder and four different rapes of Manhattan women. In jail, he said he had one more crime he wished to admit to. He had raped and attacked the Central Park jogger in 1989. And he had acted alone.

At first, Reyes’ claim was dismissed. However, on re-examination of the evidence, semen on one of Ms Meili’s socks was analysed. The DNA showed it to belong to Reyes.

Reyes gave a detailed, consistent account of the attack, one which made it obvious that he had no accomplices. There is no evidence to seriously contradict this. Yet those involved in arresting, trying and convicting the original defendants have found it hard to accept.

The immediate response of New York’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, was to reject Reyes’ story. He wanted to defend his men against the accusation that they had been overbearing when obtaining the confession. The prosecutor, Linda Fairstein, responded by saying: “I think Reyes ran with that pack of kids. He stayed longer when the others moved on.” There is no evidence to support it.

In 1989 the magnate Donald Trump ran an advert in the New York Daily Newscalling for the death penalty for the gang that attacked the jogger. Now he attacks the compensation settlement, quoting one of the case’s detectives calling it “the heist of the century”.

Two things link the Guildford Four case with that of the Central Park jogger and make them a parable, almost.

The first is that the guilt of all those convicted was determined in an atmosphere of hysteria. Gerry Conlon was jailed because at the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaign fear made people deaf to the normal rules of justice, to the careful consideration of evidence and to the need to determine whether an individual, rather than a group, was guilty of a crime.

The young men convicted in New York suffered because of a similar deficiency. It was impossible for any individual to be treated justly because that would interfere with the universally accepted narrative of what had happened.

And the tenacity with which people held to that narrative once it was formed is the second link between the two cases. No amount of proof that the Guildford Four confessions had been obtained under duress, that evidence had been forged and alibis ignored, seemed enough. Even when it became obvious that the Balcombe Street gang had in fact bombed the Guildford pub and admitted it, many involved refused to accept the innocence of Conlon and the others.

Towards the end of his life, the famous judge Lord Denning, when asked if capital punishment for the Guildford Four would have been wrong replied: “No. They’d probably have hanged the right men. Just not proved against them, that’s all.”

We all of us cling to the truth as we construct it, and we resist alternatives that challenge the construction.

In recent days, as rumours have swirled about a VIP child abuse ring, a conspiracy to cover it up, and people who have been named without any proper evidence against them, I wonder how much we have learnt.

We have a difficult task ahead of us. To get to the truth, to obtain justice for many abused children, to address the way evil acts were ignored and even tolerated, to address institutional political failure that may prove similar to that of the Catholic church, to make sure nobody, however important, is above the law.

Yet at the same time to keep our feet on the ground. Not to jump to conclusions and mistake rumour for fact. And to make sure that nobody, however important, is beneath the law either.

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