Joint Enterprise: Almost Guilty

Joint Enterprise - a 300-year old doctrine - is one of the most controversial aspects of English law often used in murder cases. It accounts for nearly 18% of all homicide cases in the UK, despite this most people have never heard of it. The doctrine allows convicting for life those who were involved in a particular criminal act, but didn't strike a fatal blow. But what if you didn't know your friend's intentions and just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? We went to investigate what devastating effect Joint Enterprise might have on the lives of those convicted for murder but plead innocent and their families.

Shooting crew:
Camera - Tashi Skervin
Director/Producer - Anastasia Pastor Kubrak
Reporter - Sam Holder

Gerry Conlon Obituary by Gareth Peirce

Gerry was a friend and inspiration to JENGbA and is deeply missed.  Gerry taught us never to give up fighting injustice and about dignity in the face of extreme prejudice and outright hostility.  If people like Lord Denning, who abandoned the principles of Blackstone's Formulation to preserve the "infallibility" of English Law had their way, Gerry and many others would still be rotting in prison...or dangling from the end of a hangman's rope.  Thank you, Gerry, for helping JENGbA to campaign for Fair Justice and for an end to the legal abuse of Joint Enterprise.

This obituary is taken from The Guardian and was written by Gareth Peirce. Gareth, the senior partner at Birnberg Peirce and Partners, is Shaker Aamer's solicitor. In 30 years as a lawyer she has represented the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six; the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead at Stockwell tube station in a bungled terrorism raid; and Moazzam Begg, who was detained in Guantánamo Bay.

Gerry Conlon obituary

As a member of the Guildford Four, a victim of one of Britain's worst miscarriages of justice

• Gareth Peirce
• The Guardian, Sunday 22 June 2014 20.34 BST

Gerry Conlon outside the Old Bailey, central London, after his conviction was quashed in 1989. Photograph: Photopress Belfast

When Gerry Conlon, who has died aged 60 of lung cancer, met survivors of the US's Guantánamo Bay detention camp, he found that their 21st-century experiences mirrored his in the 1970s. He too had been hooded, shackled and subjected to rendition – from his home in Northern Ireland to a police station in Surrey – threatened, brutalised and tortured until he confessed to the IRA bombings in 1974 of pubs in the garrison towns of Guildford and Woolwich. Yet the claim that four innocent and improbable young people were responsible should have been immediately derailed by the cast-iron alibis of two. Instead, the intimidation of alibi witnesses, or in the case of Gerry, the burial of a statement that proved he could not have been anywhere but at a hostel in Kilburn, north-west London, for young Irish men, overcame that obstacle.

Even more inconveniently, the IRA unit that had carried out some 60 other attacks to which Guildford and Woolwich were identical was captured. Three years later, in 1977, the court of appeal heard first hand the testimony of the IRA unit – they were responsible and no one else. Nonetheless, the four appellants were sent back to prison for another 12 years.

In 1980, Gerry's father Guiseppe died in an English prison. He had travelled from Belfast to rescue his son, only to be charged together with Gerry's aunt, uncle, cousins and a family friend, with possession of explosives. This time it was the turn of the scientists, who asserted falsely that the hands of each tested positive for nitro-glycerine.

Born in Belfast, growing up in the impoverished, warm and close-knit community of the Lower Falls Road, Gerry was the much-loved son of Guiseppe and Sarah. Guiseppe's death from emphysema was exacerbated by working in a lead factory; Sarah, a cleaner in the kitchens at the Royal Victoria Hospital, lived to see Tony Blair's apology in 2005 for Guiseppe's imprisonment, three years before her own death.

Gerry's childhood was one he described as happy. He scraped through primary school at Raglan Street, and at St Peter's secondary school engineered his demotion to class 1D from class 1C, where many of the boys were too studious for his liking. Class 1C learned Gaelic and the orientation of the history that was taught was Irish; had he stayed in that class he considered later he might have possessed a greater awareness of the history of Ireland and a more defined Republican point of view. Instead, he clattered through life in Belfast as a minor delinquent, scuttling back and forth to London.

In no way equipped with self-discipline or even physical stamina or fortified with any political rationale for his fate, he entered the hell of the English prisons of the 1970s, when to be Irish – and even more, IRA – was to be in danger. Year after year of solitary confinement, punishment imposed for endlessly angrily asserting his innocence, movement without notice from prison to prison, often just when his mother was using her one week's holiday to visit her husband and her son at different ends of England, humiliation, degradation and fear nevertheless fuelled an insistence that he could and would take charge of his own fate.

He clamoured and shouted and wrote and in the later years telephoned and besieged the great and the good until gradually there was movement, by the slowest of degrees. The release when it came, came with the sudden falling of the citadel; all of the evidence had been fabricated. Everyone had been wrong and he had been right.

The euphoria of release almost immediately evaporated in the pandemonium of public attention; the longed for reunion was with a family too damaged to accommodate the ways in which he was haunted by demons. He had nevertheless an acute, intelligent and articulate raw voice which vividly communicated his experience of injustice. From his book Proved Innocent (1991) there followed a film, In the Name of the Father (1993).

However, for many years he fell into an abyss from which he could not climb out, hiding like a recluse in a tiny apartment in Plymouth, Devon, knowing no one, physically and mentally broken. Unable to find joy, he resorted to drugs, attempting to experience what was otherwise inaccessible. Finally, a psychologist in Plymouth and a psychiatrist in Belfast began to identify, if not to fix, some of the broken pieces; Gerry's persistent reactivation of trauma was as bad as any observed throughout the conflict in Northern Ireland; he exhibited extraordinary recall, remembering the pattern of the policeman's tie in the Surrey police station, the tic of the prosecutor's face, the horror of his father's last days. Every night was a torment.

But despite these struggles, this brave and endearing human being made an enormous mark. He travelled all over Australia to challenge injustices there, most emphatically those to the indigenous Australian population; he spoke at every prestigious university in the US about innocent prisoners; he proffered himself as the best evidence of why the death penalty should be abolished, he visited the family of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and campaigned for his release, berating Irish Americans for their instinctive failure to extend their support to a new suspect community, the Muslims, in the same way they had to him when he was wrongly detained.

The diagnosis of his cancer came three weeks before his death, and in that time he came to understand the volume of affection for him across the world.

He is survived by his partner, his daughter and two sisters.

• Gerard Conlon, born 1 March 1954; died 21 June 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jun/22/gerry-conlon/print

Join JENGbA campaigners at the People's Assembly in London Saturday 21st June!

The Justice Gap - Diary of a UK Innocence Project 11: A Case of Joint Enterprise

By Julie Price

Diary of a UK Innocence Project 11: A Case of Joint Enterprise

This is the story behind Cardiff Law School’s Innocence Project’s eighth submission to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).

‘It was the late 1970s. I was a 15-year old Asian boy, who had arrived in the UK with poor English. Before I came to the UK I hadn’t been to school, so I couldn’t read or write in my own language either. Luckily (or not, as it turned out) my cousin took me under his wing. Although I didn’t yet know it, he was to be diagnosed with acute schizophrenia and went into a secure psychiatric unit. But not before he had changed my life forever.
My cousin had had problems with another group of Asian boys. Some like to call it a gang, of course, but that’s a label that is sometimes attached for convenience to make things look different to how they actually are when youths of the same culture hang around together. I had been involved in scuffles because I hung around with my cousin. Unknown to me, my cousin had been arrested for harassing one of their group, and had two knives confiscated. I had never had a knife.
One day, the other Asian group came looking for us. They had threatened us before and they were frightening. One of them punched me, so I hit him with a metal pole to defend myself, then I ran away. I didn’t see what happened next. Witnesses confirm that I had no knife and no contact with the man who died from stab wounds.
I was charged with murder – joint enterprise, with my cousin and someone else. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but help was at hand. My cousin’s brother was acting as interpreter for me. He sat in on my interviews as well as his brother’s, so he knew what we were both saying to the police about the charges we both faced. Oh, and as luck would have it, the kind solicitor acting for the other two accused with me was also going to represent me. In my police interviews I said, “please, I don’t understand”. I wasn’t offered a solicitor or interpreter for my first interview. I had an interpreter for my second interview, my cousin’s brother, but he didn’t really understand English either, so we all relied on someone from the solicitor’s firm to translate for all of us. My cousin’s brother was also there for me as “appropriate adult”.
When the police cautioned me, I didn’t know what this was about and my answer was “I tell the truth”, because I didn’t know what they meant. The police frightened me by rough handling me and calling me racist names. I had to sign all the documents they told me to and they wouldn’t let me see my parents until I had signed them.
I now understand that my defence was that I played a different role to my cousin, in this “joint enterprise”, and I had no foresight that something like this might happen. I had no idea my cousin had a knife, there was no plan to go out looking for trouble, the other gang started trouble and I defended myself with a bar, then ran away. I didn’t know then that my cousin had serious mental health issues.
Why was I charged with, and convicted of, murder rather than something I had actually done? All I did was defend myself using reasonable force, so I still don’t think I committed any crime. I was 15 at the time. Is this how the UK legal system works? Is it really fair?’

His story – not his words.

Fast forward almost 40 years.

That 15-year old is now in his early fifties. He was eventually released from prison on life licence in 1990, having always maintained his innocence alongside a complete lack of understanding for how he could have been charged with, let alone convicted of, murder in all these circumstances. He sought new legal advice. A young barrister became interested in his case so started to work on it, under legal aid initially, then pro bono when that ran out.

That barrister changed jobs to become an in-house barrister at a major national law firm in Cardiff, but still the case of the 15-year old bothered him. A colleague’s chance mention of our innocence project to that barrister led to us agreeing to help with the case.

Our students were troubled by the conviction that happened many years before they were born, and the lack of fairness as they saw it. They were seeing a combination of joint enterprise, mental health issues and the lack of due process in action at the same time.

The team, led by another of our amazing students Rhiannon Hughes, found a 2005 case that bore a striking resemblance to the interview/charging process endured by this client. They worked their way through the police interview tapes and considered how the doctrine of joint enterprise has evolved. After several meetings with the barrister, an extensive case was prepared for the CCRC. We are about to submit it, taking our total number of full case submissions to eight, an achievement of which we are very proud.

We cannot predict how the CCRC will view it: it will go through their normal processes. If it passes their initial sift, it is likely to be more than six months before it is allocated to a Case Review Manager to review, probably even longer because the client is out of prison so will not get priority. What we do know is that this client continues to suffer psychologically from the huge anxieties that resulted from his brutal exposure to the criminal justice system in this way, and the ongoing restrictions of living on a life licence.

Whatever the outcome of his application to the CCRC, it is doubtful that he will ever return to “normality”, damaged as he is by having spent the vast majority of his life in this turmoil.

What are our thoughts on the brink of our eighth major submission to the CCRC?

We inevitably reflect on timescales, and lament the lack of urgency that pervades the whole criminal appeals system. We wonder what might be the true number of potential miscarriages of justice, and how this will increase because of the dire legal aid situation.

The new Inside Justice website announces a horrifying statistic of 750 requests for assistance since July 2010. Ironically, that’s the exact date when we made six simultaneous submissions to the CCRC, the product of five years of work for six different people all alleging wrongful conviction, and all with persuasive cases (see HERE for the story).

But there’s another joint enterprise at work in our latest submission: the positive partnership between a group of university law students and a practising barrister. The barrister, who doesn’t want to be named, is one of those unsung heroes who beaver away behind the scenes to try to help vulnerable people who have nowhere to turn.

He introduced the case to us; we helped him with time-consuming research and tasks, to create what we think is an excellent model for partnership innocence project work. It has taken longer than we had hoped, but we have come to realise that this is inevitable where volunteers are involved.

Finally, we inevitably reflect again on the concept of joint enterprise, with its political sensitivities and recent media re-awakening assisted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism report (see HERE). Perhaps 2014 will be a watershed year for joint enterprise awareness and long-overdue reform, kick-started by the tireless campaigning of grassroots organisation, Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA), and to be continued with JENGbA Patron Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC1 drama “Common”, which is due to be aired in coming months.

Sketch by Isobel Williams – check out her blog HERE

Original Source can be found at

http://thejusticegap.com/2014/05/diary-uk-innocence-project-11-case-joint-enterprise/

JOINT ENTERPRISE: THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD TO REFORM

April 17, 2014 — Review

Written by Liz Fekete

A review of a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Injustice is simple, but legal reform is complex – that is the message, if you read between the lines, of this new report from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism which focuses on homicide convictions arising out of the legal doctrine of joint enterprise. Sometimes known as common purpose, joint enterprise allows for secondary defendants (i.e. those who did not physically commit the crime) to be charged with the same crime as the principal defendant who committed the main (index) offence, on the basis that they ‘knowingly assisted or encouraged the crime and agreed to act together with for a common purpose’. ‘Knowing assistance’ embraces secondary defendants who should have foreseen the results of the principal defendant’s action. This prosecution of multiple defendants in murder cases is a pretty harsh approach to those on the periphery of a crime, as murder carries a mandatory life sentence. Under the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, those convicted of murder must serve at least fifteen years, while changes introduced in 2010 sets the minimum term for a murder involving a knife at twenty-five years.

The findings of the 44-page report, Joint Enterprise: An investigation into the legal doctrine of joint enterprise in criminal convictions have been drawn from a survey of legal practitioners designed and conducted by the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City University London. Information was also gleaned from Freedom of Information requests, detailed examination of court papers in selected case studies, and previous academic research undertaken by Dr Dennis Eady on behalf of the campaigning group Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA).

The motivation of the three authors of the report seems to be to tease out the anomalies of the law and suggest ways in which prosecutions of joint enterprise cases can be improved.

Why the research?

Report author and JENGbA campaigners outside Parliament following the launch of the report

Thanks to the campaigning efforts of JENGbA, which is supporting 450 prisoners convicted under the doctrine (around 78 per cent of whom are from BME families), joint enterprise is no longer a buried issue and is publicly discussed as a problem in the media and parliament. In 2011 the Justice Select Committee convened a short inquiry to examine the doctrine, during which the chair, Sir Alan Beith, memorably stated (in response to the disclosure that the CPS keeps no official records on joint enterprise prosecutions) that ‘Nowadays, there are statistics to prove and disprove everything on earth. It seems to me rather strange that there are no statistics to show how often [joint enterprise] is used.’ In the light of the CPS failure to collect meaningful data on joint enterprise, Dr Dennis Eady examined 101 joint enterprise convictions of people who maintained that their conviction was unjust. While the data included inPerceptions of People: Maintaining Unjust Conviction under Joint Enterprise laws related to a small sample and statistical reliability was limited by the nature of self-reporting, it did reveal much about the nature and circumstances of joint enterprise convictions. Around 25 per cent of the sample had been convicted of joint enterprise murder, yet they say that they had no previous criminal convictions and that their sentence tariffs were approaching 30 per cent higher when the defendant claimed not to have been present at the scene of the crime (usually with the prosecution suggesting a planning role).

Filling the knowledge gap

The Bureau’s report is the result of an eight-month research project. It fills many (although not all) the statistical gaps (notably, the Bureau acknowledges its inability to collect data on ethnicity). Some of the most interesting parts of the research findings come in Chapter 1 (background and methodology) and Chapters 2 (data) and 3 (Exploring the Issues). Here we find a very useful description of the 300-year-old doctrine and its underlying principles based on guilt by association, as well as several case studies. There is valuable data too on the distortions to police and CPS rationale and ethics that arise from joint enterprise prosecutions, data that could be gold dust in the battle for legal reform. Some 17.7 per cent of all homicide prosecutions from 2005 to 2013 involved four or more defendants, suggesting that the use of joint enterprise is common in murder cases. But the more defendants charged with an offence, the more likely it is that the CPS will at a later date offer ‘no evidence’, leading the charge to be dropped at trial stage. The authors’ approach is largely along the lines of letting the facts speak for themselves (though Melanie McFadyean in the report’s Afterword attempts to go beyond the technicalities, and with her journalist’s eye embed into the discussion a political and human dimension).

Institutionalised injustice?

All the authors would, I am sure, privately acknowledge that data such as this cries out for political analysis. For the arrest and prosecution of so many defendants, some on the periphery of the scene of a murder (and some not even at the crime scene at all), suggests that the police and CPS are using the doctrine for purposes other than securing justice for the victims. One QC interviewed for the report describes joint enterprise as working as a ‘drift net’, catching ‘little fish as well as big ones, and lumping them all together’. But another point of view is that joint enterprise, by giving the police and prosecution services draconian powers, has helped create a two-tier criminal justice system in which poorer and marginalised communities are viewed as less deserving of rights and injustice is institutionalised. Ijah Lavelle Moore was aged 20 at the time of his arrest as a secondary party in the joint enterprise murder of Malakai McKenzie in Nottingham in 2012. Ijah, who wasn’t even present at the scene of the murder but was ‘scooped up’ solely because he was a friend of the principal defendant, spent 14 months on remand awaiting trial. During his trial, the young man’s mother was diagnosed with bowel cancer, dying nine days before her son was acquitted of all charges.

The way forward

This is a report written from the legal perspective and aimed at addressing the concerns of lawyers and other legal experts – a gathering together of their opinions, and a nudge to the legal establishment that reform is long overdue.  But there is a wider political context in which the doctrine of joint enterprise is applied; namely the steady criminalisation of poor, working-class and BME communities that has occurred over the last thirty years, not least through the 3,600 new criminal offences created during successive Labour governments. Multiple convictions under joint enterprise have played their part in the doubling of the prison population since 1993. The wider struggle against the ongoing injustices of laws that are built on guilt by association continues and will continue to be fought, with or without the lawyers.

RELATED LINKS

JENGbA campaigners are marching in London and Manchester on Saturday 3 May

JENGbA

Bureau of Investigative Journalism

(Original source at http://www.irr.org.uk/news/joint-enterprise-the-long-and-winding-road-to-reform/)

JENGbA Newsletter Issue 27 Jan - Mar 2014 Now Online!

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23 Reasons Why 23 Years is Enough: Clemency for Pascual Carpenter

Pascual Carpenter (along with six others) was convicted under the Felony-Murder Rule for his role as a lookout in the 1990 New York City subway robbery that resulted in the death of Utah tourist Brian Watkins. He has been in prison for the last 23 years.

This is a documentary about both Pascual's conviction and the much-criticized Felony-Murder Rule. The Felony-Murder Rules transfers culpability to accomplices for any death that occurs during certain felonies, regardless of the person's role in the crime. Pascual, an 18-year-old at the time of the offence, never foresaw, witnessed, aided, or concurred with any fatal aggression on that horrible night.

The release of 23 Reasons is timed to coincide with Pascual's supporter's petition campaign requesting that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sign an Executive Clemency for Pascual.
Sign the petition now!