25 YEARS IN JAIL FOR NOTHING

The usual dishonest police

There’s the old cliché ... that it ‘hasn’t sunk in yet’… Let me tell you: It has sunk in. I knew for years that this day would come. I don’t get excited by things very easily, after what I’ve had to endure, so I am dealing with it like I deal with everything else, calmly …" Barely 90 minutes after being freed by the Court of Appeal, Robert Brown, one of Britain’s longest-serving prisoners, who has protested his innocence for 25 years, sits in a fashionable London club looking relaxed and cool. His biggest problem is simultaneously eating his Kentucky Fried Chicken and fielding calls from well-wishers. Two TV crews are waiting for him and a radio satellite link is hooked up on the roof of the building he’s in, waiting on his comments. The sudden media interest in his case both pleases and rankles him: "Where were you years ago?" he asked reporters when he emerged from his cells in the Appeal Court. "There’s more like me still inside, please go and listen to them …"

Three-quarters of an hour earlier at exactly 11:54am, Lord Justice Rose, sitting alongside two other judges, announced at the end of an hour-long finding: "This verdict cannot be regarded as safe. We could not possibly be sure on what we have heard that the jury, had they known what we know, would have reached the same verdict. It is, to put it at its lowest, a possibility that they might have reached a quite different verdict."

Suddenly, Robert Brown’s quarter-of-a-century nightmare came to an end. The stain on his character that said he was the murderer of a 51-year-old woman named Annie Walsh from Manchester, in January 1977, was gone. His reaction, he says, was: "Disgust. The judges didn’t even look at me. They didn’t apologise to me. They only said the conviction was unsafe. How am I supposed to react to that? Am I supposed to be pleased. Yes, I am pleased I am free. But still …"

The court had heard a sorry tale of police corruption, denial of basic legal rights, physical violence and non-disclosure of evidence during the 1977 investigation and trial. It was shocking, deeply disturbing stuff. But for Robert Brown it all had a familiar, appallingly tragic ring to it. He sat, a middle-aged man, listening to the same material that he had as a fresh-faced young 19-year-old nearly three decades ago. "I should never have been convicted in the first place." he says.

Robert Brown was living in the Hulme area of Manchester in 1977 when in January of that year a local factory worker, Annie Walsh, was found brutally murdered in the flat where she lived alone. She’d suffered multiple lacerations to the head. Detectives from Greater Manchester Police were so worried about the frenzied nature of the murder that they scoured local mental units in case a violent patient had escaped without notice.

What they did have was a tenuous eyewitness who claimed she’d seen Annie Walsh with a man who had either a Scottish or Irish accent, was in his 30s and had a scarred upper lip, on the day she was presumed to have been murdered. Within two months detectives traced a man with this description, arrested him and placed him on an identification parade. The eyewitness was brought in and picked this man out. Later, after his clothes were forensically examined, a link between his clothes and a fibre found at the scene of the crime connected him to the murder. But, inexplicably, no charges were ever brought against the man, named Robert Hill.

By May 1977 Robert Brown, then unemployed and living with his 16-year-old girlfriend Cathy Shaw, had been arrested for the crime. He was beaten at the time of the early morning arrest, never read his rights, then abused physically and mentally during the next 32 hours of interrogation. When he asked for a lawyer a detective told him, "only guilty men ask for lawyers". By the end of the interrogation he cracked and signed a bogus confession.

The confession document itself was the only plank of evidence of any value presented at court when the case came to trial in October 1977. The judge presiding over the trial accepted that the main eyewitness who’d placed Annie Walsh with the man on the day of her death was unreliable - she’d been taken through three separate ID parades, picking out one man in March 1977, then another featuring men with beards, before finally picking Brown out with the doubtful words: "He’s the only one that looks like … [him]" Later eyewitnesses who claimed Brown had visited them with blood on his clothes that weekend were shown to be unreliable because they constantly changed their accounts. No forensic evidence was ever found linking Brown to the scene of the crime.

But the judge did, inexplicably, allow a pair of heavily bloodstained jeans to be shown to the court. These had been shown to Brown during questioning with the insinuation that they belonged to him and were worn when he’d killed Annie Walsh. Upon seeing the bloodstains on the crotch Brown had reportedly broken down and wept. It was known at the time of the trial however that these jeans actually belonged to a woman unrelated to the case who’d been wearing them when she suffered a miscarriage.

Mr Justice Milmo, the judge sitting in the Annie Walsh murder trial, told the jury in his summing-up that the "principal issue" they’d have to deal with was whether they believed Brown or the police detectives who said he’d confession without pressure. The jury chose to reject Brown’s pleas of innocence and instead believe the policemen. What none of them knew however, was that crucial forensic evidence had been withheld from Brown’s defence team. No-one had told them about the fibre linking the March 1977 suspect to the Walsh murder scene. Nor did they know that forensic documents had been altered by another senior detective to dilute the connection between the first suspect and the murder even further.

Even more damning was the presence of DI Jack Picton Butler, a senior investigating officer who’d played a major role in every aspect of the case. The jury was not aware that he’d already committed criminal acts of corruption and perverting the course of justice in between 1973 and 1975 for which he’d later be sentenced in exactly the same court in Manchester in 1983. Nor were they aware that the entire Manchester CID were under suspicion at the time for committing an array of illegal acts centring on their use of a local brothel where they mingled with local underworld figures. Later they’d all feature heavily in the Topping Report into corruption in the Greater Manchester Police.

The three areas the Appeal Court focused heavily on were the non-disclosure of the fibre evidence, the linguistic analysis showing Brown’s confession was not valid, and in particular, the involvement of DI Jack Butler whose name constantly cropped-up in the still PII (Public Interest Immunity) certificate-protected Topping Report. Such was the sheer weight of the case against the original verdict even standing that within 18 minutes of the hearing starting at 10:30am on Wednesday, the Crown Counsel, Julian Bevan QC, was on his feet manfully explaining that he had no fight to fight. In legal terms he explained that he was, to all intents and purposes, throwing the towel in.

Sitting behind bars in the dock, Robert Brown, who’d prepared most of his adult life for this moment, was taken by surprise at the speed of the cave-in. "I was quite stunned by it after reading the skeleton arguments from the Crown because obviously the Crown in those were saying it was safe … I think the Topping Report was the nail in their coffin. I have to admire Bevan as a man because he could have fought on every point but he never. He gave up and never fought - he folded - then I thought that Judge Rose was going to put my QC Ben Emerson through the wringer and have to get up and prove to the Crown the conviction was unsafe. It was quite refreshing actually, it put my faith back in the truth - but not the justice system. I think it’s in a bad, bad way. I think there’s good intentions but it’s in a hell of a state. When you consider that they had that documentation that could have cleared my name for almost 20 years, and didn’t disclose it, that must have been lying somewhere, the Crown must have known that it was in existence."

All of this must have come as a disappointment to two detectives from Greater Manchester Police who were present throughout the case yesterday. "I smelled them. They were staring at me …" says Brown in disgust.

Within minutes of the verdict announcing Brown’s conviction had been overturned, Greater Manchester Police issued a rapid damage-limitation press release explaining they’d co-operated with the Court of Appeal and that new procedures meant corruption was a thing of the past. No mention was made of re-opening the Annie Walsh murder inquiry. Nor was any mention made about possible prosecutions involving officers from the original case......

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