Adding insult to injury

Ultimate absurdity

Charging victims of miscarriages of justice for their board and lodging in prison is a gross insult

Duncan Campbell
Saturday March 17, 2007
The Guardian

In his play One Way Pendulum, first performed in 1959, the absurdist dramatist NF Simpson created a judge with a magnificent sense of logic. Sentencing a man convicted of 43 murders, he noted that, while two character witnesses had spoken on his behalf, "from your 43 victims - not a word. Not one of those 43 had felt under any obligation to come forward and speak for you." Nonetheless, the judge discharged the man, saying that to jail him would put him beyond the reach of the law "in respect of those crimes which he has not yet had an opportunity to commit ... The law is not to be cheated in this way."

One feels that NF Simpson's judge might have felt at home this week with the logic of the law lords' decision in the case of Vincent and Michael Hickey in their battle for compensation for their wrongful conviction in 1979 for the murder of newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater.

It was decided, by a four-one majority, that the pair, who spent more than 12 years in jail for a murder they did not commit, must pay the "living expenses" they incurred in prison and which have been deducted from their compensation package. The law lords said the deduction, which amounted to around £50,000 each, should not be seen as board and lodging, but as expenses they would have had to pay from their earnings if they had been free.

The dissenting judge, Lord Rodger, likened the men's ordeal to a "prolonged kidnapping"; and the Hickeys' solicitor, Susie Labinjoh, said that the decision "offends against justice" - but, unless a challenge succeeds in Europe, it will stand. The Hickeys are only two of many who were victims of miscarriages of justice who have effectively had to pay for their porridge. Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six, who was also wrongfully jailed, has been campaigning vigorously to halt these deductions, which are made for prisoners wrongly convicted in England and Wales but not in Scotland.

"They treat us worse than the guilty," said Hill, likening the experience of being suddenly released after many years proclaiming your innocence to that of a diver coming to the surface too fast and suffering from the bends. Reg Dudley, now 82, who spent more than 20 years inside before being cleared on appeal, says that he too would have fought against the deductions, but the legal process just takes too long.

Anyone who has spent a couple of decades inside for a crime they did not commit, or been vilified as a bomber or a child killer while in jail, will say that no amount of money will ever compensate them for the damage and time. But if there is a logic to deducting B&B expenses from a wrongly convicted person, why should it stop at the costs of board and lodging?

With the cost of travel shooting up all the time, isn't this the moment to ask whether any of the freed men and women ever put their hands in their pockets to pay for their speedy and secure transport from the Old Bailey to Parkhurst, or from Birmingham crown court to Dartmoor? Private gyms are now a major expense for the busy professional, yet wrongly convicted prisoners have been able to tone their muscles with weights and play badminton, without ever bothering to pay a monthly fee. Surely some room for deductions there?

And at a time when many people in the hectic outside world are spending hundreds of pounds to go on a retreat, shouldn't prisoners who have spent long months in solitary confinement pay an equivalent amount for the peace and tranquillity of that experience?

China has already shown the way forward by charging relatives of executed prisoners for the price of the bullet. And if anyone objects to reducing the compensation packages even further, we can always quote NF Simspon's judge: "The law is not to be cheated in this way."

duncan.campbell@guardian.co.uk

You can read the full text of the House of Lords judgment here