179: PAUL FOOT 2026: UNSAFE CONVICTIONS

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0:31Andy and Anna here from your new favourite podcast, No Such Thing As A Fish. Yes, we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating, amazing, weird, mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis. You got any good facts, Andy? Yes, how about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious, wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are no such thing as a fish.

1:12Hello and welcome back to page 94. This is the Paul Foot Award mini-series. We are interviewing six brilliant journalists about the stories that have got them shortlisted for a Paul Foot Award this year. Let's see who's in at number five. Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast My name's Adam Bohavsky, I'm a freelance journalist and my stories were published in The Lead and The Big Issue And what is the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Award this year? So the story that's brought me to the Paul Foot Awards tried to answer the question of what happens when the state wrongly punishes you? What does it ultimately owe you?

1:47And I told the stories of three people who had been wrongly convicted of a crime and then were deprived of their liberty for many years. And after all that, a very long battle to overturn their convictions, they were told that they weren't eligible for any compensation for the government. How did you first find out about this? So I was looking into this in 2024 when the post office scandal was dominating the headlines. And like many people, I wanted to understand how was it that post office scandal victims were struggling so much to get compensation. And I was surprised to find that the government had for decades administered a compensation scheme.

2:30And so that made me question why did it have to kind of create bespoke compensation schemes just for the post office scandal victims? And so I sent a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice asking them how many post office scandal victims had applied for compensation through this scheme and how many had been successful. and they told me that a handful had applied and all of them had been rejected through this scheme and then that's when kind of alarm bells started ringing i was like if this scheme is even rejecting post office scandal victims then there must be many many others and then when i dug into the the statistics i found that um at that time at that moment only six percent of people were actually being compensated of those who of the hundreds that were applying for compensation through this scheme what are some of the reasons that you might get compensation through this scheme Well, you see, this is the thing.

3:23Under international law, if you've been wrongly convicted of a crime and then a fresh piece of evidence is uncovered that leads to that conviction being overturned, you should be awarded compensation. That's what international law says. and that is largely how it had worked in the UK for a long time until 2014 in which the government decides to make this change to its statutory compensation scheme and so from 2014 onwards it wasn't simply enough that you had to uncover a new piece of evidence that undermines the original evidence that led to your conviction you now had to prove that you were innocent beyond reasonable doubt.

4:02And that's a big change because it essentially reverses the burden of proof in the criminal justice system. So, you know, for the state to punish you, it has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you're guilty. And now the state was asking people who had been wrongly convicted and had overturned their compensation to have to go the extra mile and prove they were innocent. So this is not to do with overturning your conviction. This is to do with getting compensation that you have to prove that you're innocent yeah yeah so these people have already jumped done a huge hurdle to even get to the stage in which they had overturned their convictions which is a thing that not many people manage to do if new evidence comes to light that undermines their conviction so to have gotten to this point and then be told well actually we need even more evidence to before deciding is it's kind of so why is that being treated as a separate matter Surely, if your conviction's been overturned, then you are legally no longer guilty of that crime.

5:00So why is that different? Well, there is some people. It's not. It's a knotty legal debate, essentially. And the actual effect of the government deciding to tighten or to kind of change the goalposts in this way meant that it became virtually impossible for anyone who has had their conviction overturned to get compensation. I mean, when I spoke to lawyers, they said that short of, you know, the real perpetrator actually coming forward and saying, look, I did it. It's almost almost impossible for somebody to actually prove themselves to be innocent beyond reasonable doubt. It's incredibly high standard to meet.

5:38Can you tell me about the story of Ahmed? Yeah. So one of the first people I spoke to was Ahmed Aidan and his father, Mohammed. Ahmed was 17 when he was wrongly accused of a sexual assault. and he was found guilty by a jury. In the process, it was found that he had undiagnosed schizophrenia, so he was given a hospital order rather than a prison sentence. He spent essentially 13 years under this hospital order before he was released. And when he was released, his dad, who knew he couldn't have possibly done the crime he'd been convicted for, wrote to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to ask him to review the case.

6:15Now, the Criminal Cases Review Commission is an independent body that investigates potential miscarriages of justice. It's a public body. And they took on his case, and they looked again at evidence at the centre of the case, a mobile phone that had been dropped by the perpetrator at the scene. And astonishingly, none of Ahmed's DNA was found on that phone. And now with new DNA testing, they were able to find a match on that phone that was found at the crime scene. And it pointed to a completely different man a man who had a history of a sexual offence on Tutankhamun in London where the crime had been committed.

6:59So all the signs pointed to a different person. The case then went to the Court of Appeal. Ahmed's conviction was quashed. And so, you know, you'd think from that point onwards, and certainly Ahmed and his father did, that it would be sort of an easy road to get compensation. but he was refused compensation by the government, by the Ministry of Justice. And unusually, I think it kind of speaks to how determined Ahmed's family was about this, they decided to challenge this at the high court. And, you know, lawyers argued that this new DNA evidence completely demolished the case against Ahmed. And judges seemed to be inclined to agree.

7:39You know, they said that it seemed this evidence seemed to point to an entirely different perpetrator, but nevertheless with regret, they said, they would have to uphold the refusal for compensation. And that's because of that law change in 2014, essentially, that makes it all but impossible, sets an impossible bar of having to prove your innocence to get compensation. Is this a money-saving measure? Is this austerity? I think it does come at that time. Potentially, that's one explanation for it. But even at that point in 2014 if you read back the debate that MPs are having in Parliament over this being brought in and people are warning even then about the potential for people who you know were wrongly accused of crimes being denied compensation and you know they've you know been proven right largely by that.

8:32One of the really shocking things about this story is that this is people's lives being ruined in the long term this is people spending nearly a decade and a half in prison for a crime they didn't commit and then not receiving compensation for it. I mean, it is shocking. Yes, I think we know that hundreds of people who have applied for compensation have been rejected. So there must be hundreds of people out there. Can you only apply once your conviction's been overturned? That's right. Well, yes, yes. I mean, you can technically apply without that, but you wouldn't get very far. Right. So what you're saying is that there may well be hundreds of people whose convictions have been overturned and whose lives have been turned upside down, but who have been told they won't be able to get compensation.

9:15Yes, and it has an absolutely devastating impact on people's lives because it takes so... The three people that I spoke to who had managed to overturn their conviction but refused, the actual process from leaving prison to having your conviction quashed is almost as agonising as actually being in prison for some people. Gareth Jones a care worker who I spoke to who had been wrongly accused of a sex crime he he talks about leaving prison and coming back to his small town in Wales and you know going back to the pub his local and you know just the conversation stopping people he recalled people shouting at abuse at him in the street at one point he was actually punched in the street and All of that took a huge toll on him.

10:06He said to me that those intervening years after he was released and before his conviction was overturned, he considered taking his life as a result of that. Now, at least he has the fact that his conviction has been overturned, but this missing piece of the puzzle, being awarded compensation, I think is almost as important for its symbolic value as for its monetary value. You know, Gareth told me that, you know, he never once was told sorry by anybody, you know, for the time that he lost. And, you know, I think the compensation is as close as it really comes, I think, to having some recognition that the state has really done you wrong.

10:49How long did Gareth spend in prison? Gareth was in prison for three years. He has a learning disability. And, you know, he told me that there was nothing really, no accommodation was really made for that. He tells me that he still kind of suffers with the trauma as a result of that. Another victim that I interviewed, Djokovic Sal, he actually told me that he developed PTSD in prison. He was wrongly accused of murder and was given a life sentence. And he, in his case, he almost spent 17 years in jail just after the birth of his daughter. So he could have, there's this moment where he could have actually missed the entire early life of his daughter behind jail.

11:33But he did spend 17 years in prison. No, he thankfully got out after four and a half. But, you know, the justice system moves so slowly that, you know, he spent four and a half years in one of the toughest prisons in England and developed PTSD in that time. And he came out and he told me that he suffered from the fear that the real perpetrator was still out there. The real perpetrator, he says, had been sending texts to his partner. So he was terrified. He said that he couldn't go outside looking over his shoulder the whole time. You started reporting the story as a freelancer, not attached to any particular publication.

12:13What was that like? It was really challenging. I mean, financially, it was very difficult because, you know, I've been working on this for two years. and then I mean that in of itself is a very long time a very long time for a freelancer to work on a story I was lucky enough that I was able to get a grant to do some of the work that covered some of the work but I think other than that I think yeah I think not really having an editor to kind of bounce an idea off not having other colleagues to talk to about a story can be really tough I also found it a bit of a struggle sometimes to get people to to take me seriously because I mean you're i mean without as a freelancer you're kind of just a guy with a gmail um you're not you know it's difficult to kind of ring people up and say you know i'm i'm a freelance journalist tell me about one of the darkest moments in your life you can't even tell them necessarily where you'll know that the story will be published um so it takes a lot to convince people to talk to you as a freelancer i think is there any prospect of this system changing i hope so i hope so i think change is slow and you know if you look at the the post office scandal it it took you know campaigning over so many years to get to the stage where um the victims were awarded compensation i think you know part of the reason i wanted to write this story was you know the government had acknowledged that something had gone wrong here but sort of the underlying system that hadn't been working in terms of providing compensation still remained in place and so that system uh in order to fix it I think it needs more voices to come forward, I think, which is really difficult.

13:48I think you need a chorus of voices really saying, like, look, this is what it's doing. And it's tough when all these victims are, you know, individuals. And so I guess what I wanted to do here was to kind of help build that chorus of voices calling for change. I'm pleased to say that, you know, it seems like the issue, you know, thanks to a lot of campaigning, not just at all by myself. There's been lots of great campaign groups working on this as well. it seems like that there's signs that the tide might be turning the the law commission has agreed uh has recommended that the bar be lowered for um victims to receive compensation um and so i'm hopeful that that might translate into a legal change at some point but you know it's still very early days at least it seems now there's more mps who are kind of aware of the issue so yeah i'm hopeful that there might then some that there might be some change in the on the horizon but fantastic well i hope you keep covering it thank you so that's it for today's shortlist eat we'll be back with another one tomorrow we'll see you then andy and anna here from your new favorite podcast no such thing as a fish yes we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating amazing weird mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis.

15:07You got any good facts, Andy? Yes, how about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious. Wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are No Such Thing As A Fish.