Category Archives: UK criminal justice

I had accepted my life in prison – until it prevented me helping a friend in need

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For 16 years, on and off, I was held at Her Majesty’s pleasure. It was the struggles and loss of a friend on the outside that made me realise how powerless I was

I am sure those who know my backstory of criminality imagine – reasonably – that the toughest times of my life were while I was a guest of Her Majesty, who kindly gave me full board and lodgings for 16 years, on and off, during the first six decades of my existence. And they are half right.

My first taste of her hospitality came in 1957 when, at 14, I was ordered to spend three months in a detention centre. Then a relatively new concept, these were designed to give miscreants a “short, sharp shock” that would teach us to stay on the straight and narrow.

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Suicidal asylum-seekers subjected to ‘dangerous’ use of force by guards at detention centre

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Observer investigation finds officers without the usual certification used risky restraint techniques at Brook House

Suicidal asylum seekers were subject to force by guards who the Home Office allowed to remain on duty despite being “effectively uncertified” in the safe use of restraint techniques, according to internal documents charting conditions inside one of the UK’s most controversial immigration centres.

Experts say the department endangered lives last year by deploying custody staff whose training in the safe use of force had expired, as it detained hundreds of people who had crossed the Channel in a fast-track scheme to remove them.

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Mother jailed for harming baby hits out at ‘unjust’ appeal ruling

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Lawyers and campaigners fear decision not to grant appeal against conviction risks silencing other victims of domestic abuse

A mother jailed for harming her baby has accused the courts of “injustice” after judges accepted she was a victim of abuse but ruled against an application for an appeal against her conviction made on the grounds that her violent ex-partner coerced her to lie at her trial.

The woman, known as “Jenny”, was convicted in 2017 of causing or allowing serious harm after her child sustained skull fractures and bleeding on the brain. The baby’s father was her co-defendant but was acquitted on a lesser charge.

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Do long jail sentences stop crime? We ask the expert

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Penelope Gibbs, former magistrate and founder of Transform Justice, on whether harsher sentences are effective

Until recently, the subject of criminal punishment hasn’t been a massive concern for the public (putting aside that small demographic committed to a “hang ’em all!” approach). But in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, calls for misogyny to become a hate crime have gone from a whisper to a roar. That change would give judges the power to increase sentences when misogyny was found to be an aggravating factor in a crime. But would harsher sentences do much to stop such crimes happening? I asked Penelope Gibbs, former magistrate and founder of Transform Justice, a charity campaigning for a more effective justice system.

Did you hear about the Thai fraudster who was sentenced to jail for more than 13,000 years? I guess they needed a number to describe ‘throwing away the key’. Are long sentences becoming more common?
I don’t know about across the world, but I can tell you that in England and Wales sentences have been getting steadily longer over the past decade, by roughly 20%.

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Julian Assange and fiancee claim they are being blocked from marrying

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WikiLeaks founder and Stella Moris are preparing legal action against Dominic Raab and Belmarsh jail governor

Julian Assange and his fiancee, Stella Moris, say they are being prevented from getting married and are preparing legal action against Dominic Raab and the governor of Belmarsh prison.

The action accuses the justice secretary and Jenny Louis, who runs the prison where the WikiLeaks co-founder is being held while the US is seeking his extradition, of denying the human rights of the couple and their two children.

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Julian Assange could serve jail term in Australia, lawyer for the US tells London court

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The US is appealing to Britain’s high court over a refusal to extradite the WikiLeaks founder on espionage charges, saying he ‘has no history of serious and enduring mental illness’

US authorities have told British judges that if they agree to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges, the WikiLeaks founder could serve any US prison sentence he receives in his native Australia.

In January, a lower UK court refused a US request to extradite Assange over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret US military documents a decade ago.

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Rebellion and redemption: how the Slits gave a voice to female prisoners

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Playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm on how the groundbreaking female punk band helped her tell the story of women suffocating in the prison system

It was a bit of a “pinch me” moment, to be honest. Earlier this month I sat in the rehearsal room for Typical Girls and watched our incredible cast play the music of the Slits to Tessa Pollitt, an original member of the band.

When I first started writing this show, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined we would get to this point. This absolute legend, punk royalty, was beaming at the liveness of it all and so were we. This is what we’ve all been aching to do.

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Police review teen killings in search of catalyst for spike in murders

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Pilot scheme hopes to discover patterns that will help prevent more deaths

Measures are being introduced to try to identify what is driving rising murder rates in the wake of a spike in teenage deaths in some of the UK’s homicide hotspots.

All homicides in London, Birmingham and south Wales will be reviewed by the authorities in an attempt to learn from the chaotic sequences of events that often preempt a death.

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Inside the mind of a murderer: the power and limits of forensic psychiatry

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When I was called in to assess Seb, I needed to understand why he had committed such a horrendous crime. But first I had to get him to talk

Even before Seb had arrived at the prison, five weeks before my first visit, the staff had received a notification that he ought to be subject to close monitoring. While still in police custody, an out-of-hours forensic psychiatric assessment had been requested.

Seb had been compliant with the arresting officers, but he had given the impression that he was unconcerned by what had happened – it seemed as though he didn’t mind at all that he was being arrested. More bizarrely, there were flickers of apparent self-satisfaction. Seb had been arrested on suspicion of murdering his mother.

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Home Office abandons plans to deport Osime Brown to Jamaica

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Family celebrate success of campaign to halt deportation of 22-year-old, who has autism

A 22-year-old man who has autism and his family are celebrating after the Home Office abandoned plans to deport him to Jamaica.

Osime Brown, who left Jamaica aged four to settle in the UK with his mother, Joan Martin, was facing deportation after being released from prison where he had been serving a sentence for stealing a friend’s mobile phone, though he and others said he did not do it.

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Home Office condemned for forcing migrants on bail to wear GPS tags

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Round-the-clock tracking condemned as ‘Trojan horse’ giving government vast surveillance powers that violate human rights

More than 40 human rights organisations have condemned the Home Office’s introduction of 24-hour GPS monitoring of people on immigration bail in an expansion of surveillance powers that has involved no consultation process.

The new policy marks a shift from using radio frequency monitors (which alert authorities if the wearer leaves an assigned area) to round-the-clock GPS trackers (which can track a person’s every move), while also giving the Home Office new powers to collect, store and access this data indefinitely via a private contractor.

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Cruel, paranoid, failing: inside the Home Office

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Something is badly wrong at the heart of one of Britain’s most important ministries. How did it become so broken?

For the thousands of people who end up on the wrong side of the Home Office each year, there is often a sudden moment of disbelief. This can’t be happening, people tell themselves. They can’t do this, can they?

For Ruhena Miah, a sales assistant born and raised in the West Midlands, this moment came when she received a letter saying that if she wanted to marry the man she loved, she would have to move to Bangladesh. For Tayjay Thompson, a young man convicted of a drugs offence when he was 17, it was when he was told he would be deported to Jamaica, a country he’d left as a toddler. For Monique Hawkins, a Dutch software engineer, it was when her application for a residency permit was rejected, despite the fact she had lived in the UK for 24 years. For Omar, a refugee from Afghanistan (who asked me not to use his real name), it was when he stepped off the plane at Heathrow and discovered that he was being taken to a building that looked to him very much like a prison.

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Ex-police reveal bribes and threats used to cover up corruption in 70s London

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BBC documentary to examine incidents that led to setting up of unit on which Line of Duty’s AC-12 is based

One of London’s most senior police officers, described by a colleague as “the greatest villain unhung”, was believed to be involved in major corruption in the 1970s but never prosecuted, according to a new documentary on police malpractice.

Former officers who exposed corruption at the time describe how they were threatened that they would end up in a “cement raincoat” if they informed on fellow officers and were shunned by colleagues when they did.

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UK failed to inform EU countries about almost 200 killers and rapists

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Exclusive: total of 112,490 criminal convictions not sent to relevant EU capitals over eight-year period

The conviction of 109 killers, 81 rapists and a man found guilty of both crimes in UK courts was not passed on to the criminals’ home EU countries due to a massive computer failure and subsequent cover-up, the Guardian can reveal.

The most serious cases are among a total of 112,490 criminal convictions not sent to the relevant EU capitals over an eight-year period due to a catastrophic computer error, which some fear has put lives at risk.

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Shamima Begum court decision brings shame on UK | Letters

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Readers respond to the supreme court decision that Begum will not have her citizenship restored

Every day it seems the Guardian serves up another reason for being ashamed to be British. On Friday, it was the case of Shamima Begum (Shamima Begum loses fight to restore UK citizenship after supreme court ruling, 26 February). It makes it particularly difficult that I’m tutoring someone who is hoping to take an A-level in British politics. All the books list human rights and explain how carefully protected they are in our system. Article 5 is supposed to protect the right to liberty and freedom from arbitrary detention. Yet the supreme court is unable to protect Begum’s rights against a home secretary who is operating a policy based on pandering to public opinion in return for (hoped-for) votes.

We are told that legal protections are particularly important in difficult cases – that is, cases where an individual presents as unpleasant or undeserving. Begum was a teenager who took the extraordinary step of leaving her country to defend something she believed was deserving of her support. But even if she left with the firm intention of terrorising her fellow citizens, does this mean she should be deprived of her rights? It is a matter not of what Begum deserves but of what our national honour, and our constitution, deserve. This has been increasingly in doubt in recent years, with the government threatening to renege over the Northern Irish border agreement; not to mention the Chagos Islands and our participation in rendering citizens to be tortured during the “war on terror”.
Jeremy Cushing
Exeter

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Lawyers seek justice for women jailed for killing abusive partners

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A failure to account for previous violence has led to at least 20 unsafe murder convictions, campaigners claim

It was a specific moment in which she thought she might die that drove Stella to the brink. “He had strangled me at the bottom of the stairs and that frightened me because you can get punched in the face or your hand broken, but I had never lost my breath before,” she recalled.

For Nicole, she was “pushed over the edge” when violence by her partner triggered a post-traumatic response to historic abuse by other men. “I was getting flashbacks of abuse ... everything came to a head and I just lost it.”

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Home Office admits 15,000 people deleted from police records

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Policing minister, Kit Malthouse, reveals figures a month after data blunder was first revealed

A blunder led to the records of more than 15,000 people being deleted in their entirety from the Police National Computer, the Home Office has admitted. News of the data loss emerged last month, but on Monday the government put numbers on what had been erased.

The policing minister, Kit Malthouse, said in a written statement that a total of 209,550 offence records relating to 112,697 individuals had been deleted from the PNC, which is run by the Home Office and used by forces across the UK. That included the entire records of 15,089 people.

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Covid restrictions on visits to detained children and parents are ‘cruel’, MPs told

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Prison, care home and mental health institution visit limitations failing to consider impact on family life, campaigners say

Children with parents in prison have been forgotten during lockdown, campaigners have told MPs.

The cross-party human rights committee is looking at the impact on the right to family life, with a focus on people in institutional settings including prisons, care homes and mental health facilities.

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Authorities had four warnings about Reading attacker’s mental health

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Refugee support chief warned of Khairi Saadallah carrying out ‘London Bridge-type scenario’

• Reading attacker Khairi Saadallah given whole-life prison sentence

Repeated warnings were given that Khairi Saadallah, who murdered three men in a Reading park last summer, could carry out a “London Bridge-type scenario” shortly before the killings took place, the Guardian has learned.

Documents reveal that Nick Harborne, chief executive of the Reading Refugee Support Group (RRSG), who had had dealings with Saadallah since 2016, made four specific warnings to health and probation professionals between 4 December 2019 and 12 June 2020 that Saadallah could commit a violent crime if he did not receive appropriate support.

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Doubts emerge in US over future of Assange extradition case

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Joe Biden’s priorities could scupper extradition of WikiLeaks co-founder, says departing Virginia attorney

The American prosecutor seeking to put Julian Assange on trial in the US has said he is uncertain if Joe Biden’s incoming White House administration will continue to seek the extradition of the WikiLeaks co-founder.

Zachary Terwilliger, who was appointed by Donald Trump, made the comments as it was announced that he was stepping down as the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

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