Special Court Orders Cast Doubt on Kevin Lane Conviction

  

 

 

 

Special court orders cast doubt on Kevin Lane murder conviction

  Kevin Lane has spent more than 18 years in prison, but has vowed to clear his name before being released

 

Jamie Doward

The Observer, Sunday 21 July 2013

 

Kevin Lane says he is innocent of the crime for which he was convicted.

Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

 

Doubts have emerged about the conviction of a contract killer following a trial in which special court orders were used to keep sensitive information out of the public domain.

 

Kevin Lane was convicted in 1996 of the murder in 1994 of Robert Magill, a car dealer from Hertfordshire. Lane's co-accused, Roger Vincent, was acquitted.

 

Lane, who has admitted to having been brought up in the criminal underworld, has protested his innocence since his conviction. Having served more than 18 years for murder, he is now in a category D prison – a sign that he is due for release soon. However, he has vowed to clear his name before his release and has launched a number of unsuccessful appeals that have raised questions about his conviction.

 

During his latest appeal hearing, last week, it was confirmed that many documents relating to Lane's conviction had been withheld from his defence team under public interest immunity certificates. The certificates, which are used to keep information from being disclosed in court, are often applied by judges to protect the identity of informants. But they also made it difficult for Lane to request documents that he believes could be instrumental in clearing his name. And documents that have been shared with Lane's lawyers have been heavily redacted.

 

It has emerged that some of the documents relate to a former police officer involved in the case, Detective Inspector Chris Spackman, who was instrumental in securing Lane's conviction but was jailed in 2003 for corruption relating to a separate case.

 

Prosecution lawyers involved in Lane's case and appeals have always maintained that Spackman's conviction, long after Lane was jailed, had no bearing on his case. However, during last week's hearing, it emerged that the police were aware of allegations that Spackman had been corrupt as far back as 1994, the year of Magill's murder.

 

It also emerged that among documents seized from Spackman's office upon his arrest was a reference to a file or files which were marked "Lane/Vincent". It is unclear why Spackman was in possession of the files.

 

The hearing was told that the commission had not seen or examined the files, and did not know whether the files were still available for examination. The material's existence was disclosed by the police to the Crown Prosecution Service.

 

Lane's barrister, Joel Bennathan QC, told the hearing that the fact that the police had such information but that it had never been made known to Lane's lawyers "ought to be a matter of the greatest concern".

 

It was alleged during the hearing that Spackman held "off the record" meetings with Vincent when he was in custody awaiting his murder trial.

 

Vincent, who was jailed for the murder of drug dealer Dave King in 2003, has always denied any collusion with Spackman, and any involvement in the Magill killing.

 

Spackman has also denied any suggestion of impropriety relating to the Lane conviction. Lane's lawyers will now review the information that has been shared with them.

About this article

Special court orders cast doubt on Kevin Lane murder conviction
This article appeared on p17 of the Main section section of the Observer on Sunday 21 July 2013. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 00.04 BST on Sunday 21 July 2013. It was last modified at 00.06 BST on Sunday 21 July 2013.

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CCRC to Receive Increased Funding

Miscarriages of justice body to receive increased funds after applications rise

The 10% increase comes amid cuts to criminal legal aid, leading lawyers to ask whether a better funded CCRC will address the problem of lack of legal representation

         

• Brian Thornton
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 July 2013 18.16 BST

The release of the Birmingham Six at the Old Bailey in 1991. The idea of the CCRC was established by the Runciman Commission,set up following numerous high profile cases Photograph: Rex Features

The body responsible for investigating miscarriages of justice is to receive a 10% increase in funding after a surge in applications from prisoners claiming they have been wrongfully convicted.
Last year the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) received 1,625 applications from people asking it to investigate their cases – a 64% increase on previous years.
The CCRC believes the dramatic rise in applications is the result of a change in the way that prisoners can apply to the commission.
Richard Foster, chairman of the commission, said: "This is not about some sudden upsurge in miscarriages of justice. It is about the commission making itself much more accessible to those who may most need its help and allowing people to make applications in ways which best suit them personally."
The new application form – which has been advertised in all prisons — includes pictures and simpler language so that prisoners with even the most basic reading and writing skills can complete it.
Studies have found that more than 50% of prisoners have literacy levels below that expected of 11 year olds.
The Ministry of Justice's (MoJ) promise to give the CCRC nearly half a million pounds extra in funding is particularly noteworthy given the background of swingeing cuts to criminal legal aid.
A MoJ spokeswoman said: "The Criminal Cases Review Commission is an integral part of our justice system.
Over the past year they received a 64% increase in applications so we have granted them a small increase in their budget to deal with the workload and they have allocated more resources to processing applications to reduce delays."
The funding of the CCRC has long been a contentious issue. The body had suffered a funding cut of 30% in real terms over the last seven years, resulting in redundancies at the commission's Birmingham headquarters.
This lead critics of the organisation to claim that it lacked the resources to tackle the volume of cases it had to deal with every year.
The idea of the CCRC was established by the Runciman Commission which was set up following numerous high profile miscarriages of justice such as the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six.
Garry Runciman, chair of the Royal commission, admitted that it was the funding of the CCRC, rather than its structure that had concerned him.
"I hoped that if a new independent authority was set up on our recommendation that the government wouldn't just tick the box and then start cutting back on the funding."
Professor Michael Zander, who was also part of the Runciman Commission, praised the organisation for making itself more accessible: "On the whole I think they've being doing quite well, given their resources. The admirable attempt to make their message better known to prisoners has resulted in them being deluged by even more applications."
"The increased funding is definitely a vote of confidence [in the CCRC] because everything has been going downhill and for anything to get more resources at the moment is remarkable.
"So that's a triumph, or it may be a recognition that they've been shortchanged over quite a long time and it's now got to a point where even this government has to do something about it, which I applaud. They need all the help they can get in terms of resources."
The haemorrhaging of staff has now been halted and the commission is currently recruiting case review managers, commissioners and investigations specialists.
"We will be spending this money on front-line staff.  We aim not just to cope with this huge increase in applications but also to maintain or improve waiting and turnaround times for cases," said Foster.
"We all know the pressure on public finances. Ministers would not have increased our funding if they did not recognise both the work the commission has done to make itself as efficient and effective as it can and the importance of identifying, and remedying, miscarriages of justice whenever and wherever they occur."
For those working with prisoners who are maintaining their innocence – sometimes for decades – in prison, the increased funding is welcome, but concerns over the CCRC's approach remain.
Maslen Merchant, a lawyer who specialises in miscarriage of justice cases, thinks that the CCRC should see this as an opportunity to refocus its approach.
"I think the CCRC sometimes forgets who they're dealing with and also the effect that delays can have. It once took a year for the CCRC to publish a decision it had made on a case. The prisoner – was had served 16 years already — was on suicide watch while he awaited his decision.
"They need to meet the prisoners and the families so that they understand what's at stake. Otherwise it's just another file – just another name," said Merchant.
Solicitor Glyn Maddocks, who worked for more than 12 years to get the conviction of Paul Blackburn quashed, agrees: "If the CCRC uses the money to properly and effectively investigate cases rather than doing desktop reviews as they have being doing in recent years, then I would applaud it," he said.
But a better funded CCRC does not really address the real problem facing the wrongly convicted – namely a lack of legal representation, according to Maddocks.
A shortage of solicitors to take on these difficult and complex cases has turned into a crisis, with most applicants to the CCRC now having no legal representation.
With the MoJ aiming to cut £220m out of criminal legal aid the situation is unlikely to get any better.
Maddocks and other criminal law experts have now created the Centre for Criminal Appeals to try to address the shortfall in legal representation for those who claim to be victims of a miscarriage of justice.