Wednesday 18 December 2013

Email To Commonwealth Human Rights Initative (CHRI) - December 6, 2013

"Hi

I wonder if you can advise us if you have a policy or guidance on the application and adoption of the English Common Law Principle of "Joint Enterprise" or "Joint Criminal Enterprise" in the Criminal Legal Systems of the Commonwealth Nations?
 
JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association) is a campaign group seeking to reform the abuse of this legal principle mainly in England & Wales but has become aware of cases in other parts of the world including Australia, several Caribbean Islands (including Trinidad & Tobago and Grenada), and in the Solomon Islands.   We are beginning to see the misuse of the Doctrine of "Common Purpose" as a Human Rights Issue, where Collective Liability is used to prosecute, convict, and sentence people with lesser or even no involvement in the main offence.
 
We are very interested in CHRI's research or opinion on the application of this legal principle and hope you can refer us to Human Rights Campaign groups in the Commonwealth who we can approach to find out their own views and experiences.
 
You can find out about JENGbA at the links below.
 
Thank you for reading!"

 

Monday 16 December 2013

JENGbA Newsletter December 2013 Now Online!

You can view, download and print JENGbA's latest newsletter by clicking HERE

Saturday 14 December 2013

Justice for Jack Dempsey - Another Joint Enterprise Case

My son, Jack Dempsey, is a victim of the perverse law known as Joint Enterprise. His crime was to behave bravely by pursuing a criminal assailant to detain him and for that he received a sentence of life imprisonment.

The Party
In January 2003, Jack was out with a friend and acquaintances, Nicki Miller, sisters Stacey and Ashley Faunch, and Stacey's boyfriend, Tyrone Woolley. They were celebrating Nicki's eighteenth birthday. Jack was twenty-one, Woolley was twenty-three and the sisters were both under twenty years old. Nicki was the only one of the party who Jack knew as a friend. The others were just acquaintances. They went to a disco, The Boulevarde, in London's Ealing Broadway, and had a good time. As the party left the club they saw an abusive row going on between some East European guys and three young men, two black guys and twenty-seven years old Paul Carr, who was of mixed race. They deliberately avoided this fracas by turning into a pedestrianized shopping precinct. But the row tailed off just then and Paul Carr and his companions followed them into the precinct.

The First Incident
What happened next is attested to by witnesses. Paul Carr and his mates caught up with Nicki Miller's party near a well known horse statue just off Uxbridge Road. They started chatting-up the girls, who told them they had boyfriends. At first, the encounter was good-natured but Paul Carr persisted with his unwelcome advances and the exchanges became heated. Tyrone Woolley then produced a flick-knife from his hip pocket and threatened Carr. This was the first time anybody else in the party knew Woolley had a knife on him. Jack was alarmed by this development and interposed himself between Woolley and the other guys. Carr's two companions were also worried and pulled Paul Carr away, saying they didn't want any trouble. Woolley then put the knife away. As the two groups parted, Carr pulled free of his mates and returned to pester Ashley Faunch. He started to paw her and she warded him off. A witness overlooking this incident from his bedroom window testified to exactly what happened then. As Ashley fended him off, Carr punched her so forcefully in the face that her tooth penetrated her cheek. She fell unconscious to the ground. Carr turned and fled immediately after delivering this vicious punch. The others, including Carr's companions, ran to help Ashley but Jack chased after Carr straight away. As he ran around the corner on to Uxbridge Road, Carr stopped and tried to punch Jack, but missed. Jack tried to punch back but Carr caught his arm and threw him down, then he fled again. Jack got up and pursued Carr again. He did not know that Tyrone Woolley and Stacey Faunch had joined the chase behind him at that point.



The Fatal Second Incident

Paul Carr ran about two hundred metres into another disco where he was already known as a troublemaker. The bouncer, Mr Ngei, grabbed him and started to push him back out just as Jack arrived. Jack was panting for breath, but he called for the receptionist to call the police and he shouted at Carr, "Why are you punching girls?" He said this hoping the bouncer would help him to hold Carr until the police arrived. Woolley and Stacey arrived behind Jack as Carr was forced out of the doorway. Carr threw a punch at Jack as soon as the bouncer released him, but missed. Jack tried to pin his arms but Carr pulled away and then threw a punch at Woolley, who scuffled with him. Woolley then turned and ran from the scene. Paul Carr pulled his shirt off, revealing a blood wound to his side. He then collapsed. At that point, Jack and Stacey realised Woolley had used his knife. They too then ran from the scene. This all took place in less than a minute.

The Aftermath
Jack and Stacey returned to the horse statue to rejoin Nicki Miller and Ashley Faunch, who had recovered consciousness by then. There was no sign of Tyrone Woolley so Jack called him on his mobile. Woolley agreed to return to meet them. When he came back, Jack and the three girls got into his car but Woolley wanted to go to his mother's house to discuss the incident. Jack knew this was a very serious issue and he told Woolley to drop him off instead. After Jack left the car. Stacey asked her boyfriend, "What did you do?" Woolley replied, "I stabbed him." At his house, his mother also asked what happened and Woolley told her he had, "... stabbed the guy with his car keys!" All three girls testified to these confessions later. Paul Carr died in hospital about an hour after the stabbing.


The following afternoon as Jack returned from work on a bus, he saw police incident tapes around the entrance of The Boulevarde. He phoned Woolley and told him the matter was obviously quite serious. Later that day, the media reported the death of Paul Carr and the police hunt for the 'gang' responsible. Woolley and his mother took a plane to America that evening.

The three girls were traced the next day and then armed police raided Jack's mother's house looking for him. Jack had moved in with his partner and their baby son a few weeks earlier and so he was safe for a while. He decided to give himself up a few days later because he knew the police would have heard all the details from the girls. He also knew he had not done anything criminal.

The Murder Charges and Trial

Jack and Stacey were both charged with murder! Tyrone Woolley was arrested weeks later in Canada and was extradited to face trial along with them. Jack and Stacey were charged with murder under the doctrine of Joint Enterprise

Woolley's defence was that it was Jack who had stabbed Paul Carr. He said he had no weapon that night and denied producing a flick-knife at the horse statue incident in spite of the evidence of the girls and Paul Carr's two companions. He denied confessing to the girls in the car and at his mother's house and claimed that Jack and the three girls, including his own girlfriend, beside him in the dock, had conspired to blame him in his absence! Needless to say, he was convicted of murder.

Khalid: The police had acquired a very pliable and untrustworthy witness. He was an Afghan by name of Khalid, whose English was very poor and whose immigration status was questionable. He was operating that night as an illegal mini-cab driver. He had given false identification details to the police at the scene of the killing but they traced him after a week of enquiries at other mini-cab firms in the area.



His evidence was contradicted by numerous verifiable facts; his claim to have seen into the club's foyer as Paul Carr was manhandled out - but CCTV coverage of the entrance to the disco shows the pair of drapes that makes that impossible! - the evidence of Mr Ngei and other people at the scene as well as the differing accounts of the incident he gave in several different statements.



Critically, he had confused Jack with the victim. He described Jack as a "half-caste" and Paul Carr as "the boy". The reverse was true. Jack was twenty-one and white English whereas Paul Carr was twenty-seven with an African father and an English mother. Khalid also passed Jack by and misidentified an innocent volunteer in a police line-up. Regardless, both the prosecution and the trial judge used his highly dubious evidence to suggest that both Jack and Stacey had participated in an attack on Paul Carr in the doorway of the disco. He claimed to have heard the 'half-caste' (Jack) shouting, "Give it to him." to Woolley in the club's entrance. He also said Stacey had kicked Paul Carr as he lay on the ground dying.



This was deadly Joint Enterprise evidence against Jack and Stacey, despite the fact that even the prosecution conceded Khalid's evidence could be as much as 75% wrong! Stacey's counsel was able to prove materially that Khalid was definitely wrong about the alleged kick.



Pathology Evidence:

Dr Freddy Patel was declared unfit to practice and struck off by the General Medical Council in August 2012. Unfortunately, he was still on the Home Office list of pathologists in 2003 and his evidence was very damaging against both Jack and Stacey because he recorded a number of bruises and brawl injuries as well as two stab wounds on Paul Carr's body. This made it look as if these injuries were inflicted on him at the entrance of The Boulevarde but that was not the case.



Apart from the stab wounds, all the cuts and bruises on his body were older because he had been involved in a very violent fight with two off-duty policemen in a pub in Harrow three days earlier. The pub window was broken in this fight and he also resisted arrest violently when uniformed police arrived, adding to his injuries. A police doctor recorded his injuries at the police station in Harrow but Freddy Patel made no age distinction between the various injuries and the stab wounds in his written report.



This written report was accepted because the defence, inexplicably, did not call evidence about the Harrow fight. It was classified as 'unused evidence' and Dr Patel was not called to be cross-examined. This meant that the jury could conclude that there was a violent fight involving Woolley, Jack, Stacey and Paul Carr during the course of which he suffered the various other injuries recorded in the post mortem report.   

Jack's Defence:
Jack related truthfully the sequence of events and his role and intentions in pursuing Paul Carr that night to the police when he gave himself up and in the witness box at the trial. Only Khalid's evidence conflicted with Jack's and Stacey's accounts. But his evidence also conflicted with the bouncer's evidence. Mr Ngei remembered hearing Jack shout, "Why are you punching girls." but denied hearing anything else and contradicted claims by Khalid about the alleged fight. The disco receptionist confirmed the bouncer's account. Nevertheless, the trial judge was hostile and bad-tempered with these two witnesses but highly accommodating with Khalid. He gave Khalid an hour's break during his cross-examination to allow him to refresh himself with his earlier statements to the police because he was so incoherent, inconsistent and uncertain. After the verdicts, the judge also gave Khalid a reward of five-hundred pounds for the value of his testimony. Another witness, Mr Samra, an Indian guy who also failed to hear anything Khalid claimed to have heard and who called the ambulance and administered first-aid to the stricken Paul Carr until it arrived, did not even get a mention from the judge.

The Verdicts and Sentences
The jury returned to court during their deliberations to ask to read statements again and to ask the judge if they could find one defendant guilty of manslaughter. The judge was very irritable with them. He admonished them because he had spent two days summing up. He then repeated the concept of culpability that informs the perverse law of Joint Enterprise which, in effect, means that murder convictions should be returned against anybody in the company of a killer. A concept that makes us all responsible for the deadly actions of others. My brother's keeper. 



Wooley was found guilty of murder, not surprisingly in view of his absurd defence, and he received a life sentence with an 18-year tariff. Jack was also found guilty of murder and received a life sentence with a tariff of 16-years. Stacey was acquitted.

Futile Appeals

Just after the trial, Jack received a bundle of documents by post. Labelled 'unused evidence', they were sent to him anonymously. They recorded the details about the Harrow fight confirming that Paul Carr's injuries, apart from the stab wounds, had not been inflicted that night. Jack started an immediate appeal with a new legal team. Dr Freddy Patel was approached and made the following statement:


"I concur with the serious concerns expressed by the defence counsel that crucial medical evidence of Dr W who had examined the deceased [in Harrow] a couple of days prior to his death was not disclosed at the original trial. An insight into the age of the injuries listed by Dr W could have significantly altered my opinions on the causation of these injuries. Therefore, at this late stage it is paramount in my view that the colour album of the postmortem photographs are reproduced for Dr W in the first instance to identify the older injuries and thereafter Dr R to prepare an expert report for the defence following which I can review my original opinions and give due consideration to any appropriate amendment in the light of new disclosures."  

Regardless of his medical incompetence, Freddy Patel was honest enough to appreciate the crucial nature of the unused evidence. Nevertheless, the appeal court rejected Jack's appeal because they said his defence knew about this evidence and chose not to use it! This is staggering. Jack did not know about this evidence but he knew full well that the jury thought he and Woolley had fought with Paul Carr. But that was not the case. Apart from his failed attempt to punch Jack and then Woolley's scuffle and stabbing, Paul Carr was not otherwise assaulted at that time.



It appears our appeal courts abide by the idea that if a barrister is negligent or incompetent, his client suffers the consequences, even a life sentence! Whether or not the defence teams actually knew about these Harrow injuries is uncertain. It was available in the case papers and that is all that is certain. We have not been able to ascertain the truth because the original legal team refuse to comment about the case. But many other cases of miscarriages have revealed how the police are very skilful at concealing evidence favouring the defence by mislabelling it.

A second appeal was launched by Edward Fitzgerald QC, who campaigns vigorously against Joint Enterprise convictions. But the result was the same. Once a jury finds somebody guilty, that verdict is set in concrete as far as the criminal justice system in the UK is concerned.

Why?    
The accounts given above are true and Jack's mother and sister, myself and his partner are devastated that Jack is suffering unjust imprisonment for a murder in which he took no part and could not possibly have predicted while his son grows up without a father. How could a jury convict Jack of murder in those circumstances?

The answer is that there is a political policy of the day that requires the state to appear to be tough on knife crime and on 'gangs', whatever that means. Any couple of friends or small group can now be described as a 'gang' and Joint Enterprise is being used on an everyday basis to convict innocent people, mostly young black guys, of murder whenever a fatality occurs in a common brawl. It has no relationship to justice or morality and it is being extended to many other sorts of crime as well. The police love Joint Enterprise and regularly advertise their intention to use it. Convictions are easily obtained because they do not have to prove any actual criminal behaviour. Judges are stretching the concept of culpability to such a degree that they can persuade juries to convict innocent parties in Joint Enterprise cases. Just being there is enough.

There is also a massive reluctance on the part of governments and the judiciary to accept the fact that the police often groom witnesses, fabricate evidence and commit wholesale perjury in the course of their everyday duties. The huge number of cases of known miscarriages, along with the many others never exposed, proves this point. The Cardiff Five case, the Stefan Kiszko case and the case of Gary Mills and Tony Poole best describe the culture of corruption and abuse endemic in our police CID forces.


The fact that Jack's jury convicted him but acquitted Stacey is also inconsistent with the evidence. If they believed Khalid then they should have convicted Stacey. If they didn't believe Khalid then they should have acquitted Jack. Stacey was lucky but as I discovered in other examples of Joint Enterprise cases, juries seem to acquit some defendants because they feel bad about convicting all the companions of the actual perpetrator.

       
The evidence of Dr Freddy Patel was very damaging but Khalid's was also critical regardless of its conflict with the testimony of other witnesses. The police saw Freddy Patel's report and wrongly concluded, as did the jury and everybody else, that Paul Carr had been in a fight outside The Boulevarde. They needed a witness to say there was such a fight because Mr Ngei's evidence did not record such a fight. I believe Khalid was primed by the police to make claims about what he saw and heard that night to create a fight that never happened but which made a Joint Enterprise case against Stacey and Jack. Khalid was scared of deportation or charges in relation to his illegal mini-cabbing and he was, therefore, putty in their hands. The cases of Sion Jenkins and Dudley and Maynard as well as the Cardiff Five shows clearly the way the police groom or blackmail witnesses. If you don't believe they do this, I can only say you are very naive.



I can tell you that almost all miscarriages are a result of police corruption of evidence and I invite you to examine the few cases I mention above on their websites or the many other cases mentioned on websites run by INNOCENT - JENGbA and JUSTICE. There is a link below to the JENGbA site:


What Next?
I have joined with an organisation called JENGbA (Joint Enterprise: Not Guilty by Association) in a public campaign to fight for justice for my son and the sons and brothers of the more than three hundred mostly young kids who have been inhumanly imprisoned because politicians want to look good in public on the law and order issue. I recommend that you check out the cases of Jordan Cunliffe, Nicola Faulds, Tirrell Davis, Jade Braithwaite and any of the many other cases where the state has used collective punishment to imprison innocent people.

Joint Enterprise is an evil law that is a menace to everybody and their children. If you go out with a friend and there is a fight, it doesn't matter that you do nothing criminal, you will be charged and convicted of murder if someone in your company kills. We must force the hypocrites who rule us to repeal this dreadful anti-social law.



"For evil to triumph it is necessary only for good men to do nothing."

(Edmund Burke)

Please support JENGbA and help to get justice for my son and many others like him. Write to your MP or contact the following e-mail address to offer moral support: andy@jackdempseyinjustice.co.uk - or use the link above.