Criminal Cases Review Commission

Debate between Damian Collins and Gordon Henderson

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Gordon Henderson (in the Chair)]

I will call Damian Collins to move the motion and then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

It is a particular pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Henderson. I wish to bring up the case of my constituent, Paul Cleeland, who is sitting in the Public Gallery for this debate, in relation to the work of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. I appreciate, Mr Henderson, that this is not a court, you are not a judge and I am not a lawyer. However, the CCRC is a public body, established by the Criminal Appeal Act 1995, and is subject to scrutiny by Parliament.

The CCRC has been the subject of Select Committee reports, particularly the Justice Select Committee report in 2015, which raised concerns about the threshold for the referral of cases by the CCRC to the Court of Appeal, in particular on the safety first principle. That was acknowledged in the Government’s response to the report. Admittedly, some years later it is now the subject of an inquiry by the Law Commission that was established in 2022, although that piece of work is still at the pre-consultation phase. Therefore, I think this is a legitimate area for a debate in Parliament, as the CCRC is a public body.

Mr Cleeland’s case has been presented in Parliament on numerous occasions since he was convicted of murdering Terry Clarke in November 1972 in Stevenage. The case was raised in Adjournment debates in the House of Commons in 1982 and 1988, and by me in 2011 and again today. Many regard it as a miscarriage of justice, one of a series of miscarriages of justices that we are familiar with, certainly from the 1970s, but one that remains outstanding. Mr Cleeland has always maintained his innocence and never accepted guilt; when he was released on licence from prison after 26 years he still refused to admit any liability for the offence, and he has continued to fight to clear his name since, including repeated appeals to the CCRC for his case to be referred to the Court of Appeal.

For the benefit of the Minister and other hon. Members I will give a brief summary of Mr Cleeland’s initial trial and why it was regarded almost from the start as a potential miscarriage of justice. Mr Cleeland was committed of murdering Terry Clarke, a man that he knew, had worked with and was familiar with. Mr Clarke was shot twice with a shotgun at the rear of his property in Grace Way in Stevenage—one shot in the back and, after he turned to face his assailant, a fatal wound in the chest. It was alleged that the Gye & Moncrieff shotgun was found near the scene of the crime. It was established by the Crown in Mr Cleeland’s trial that that was the murder weapon, although there has never been any forensic evidence linking the gun to the murder or to Mr Cleeland.

There was a concern shortly after the trial about the likelihood that Mr Cleeland would have murdered Mr Clarke in that location and in that way. First, it would have required him to wait for Mr Clarke to return home at two in the morning, in a road that was effectively a cul-de-sac with a series of residential properties where he could easily have been observed. Waiting for someone that he knew, the chances are that he would himself have been recognised by neighbours in the area, so many people questioned whether that seemed likely.

Secondly, there were questions about the motive for the crime. In the local reporting at the time of the murder there seemed more likely scenarios. In particular, Mr Clarke was due to give evidence in Stevenage court the following week and it was believed that he might give evidence against other criminals who he felt were complicit in charges that he faced. There may have been other people with a motive for wanting Mr Clarke off the scene.

There are particular concerns relating to the Gye & Moncrieff shotgun. In the evidence considered by the court in Mr Cleeland’s trial, looking at the spread of the pellets on the body of the victim, it was believed that the shotgun must have been fired between 18 feet and 40 feet away from Mr Clarke. That seems implausible. One of the only eyewitnesses to the murder, the man’s widow, said that the assailant shot at close range, was about 5 feet 8 inches—shorter than Mr Cleeland—and that he had dark hair, while Mr Cleeland had fair hair. There was no corroboration, from one of the only eyewitnesses, that he was likely to have been the murderer.

Later that same month, two sawn-off shotguns were found in a weir near Harlow by Essex police. They referred those guns to the Hertfordshire police investigating Mr Clarke’s death, to consider whether they might have been the murder weapons. The significance of sawn-off shotguns was that they were consistent with the assailant’s approaching Mr Clarke at short range, because a sawn-off shotgun would have produced the spread of pellets in the victim’s body consistent with a short-range shooting, but only from a pump-action gun.

Nevertheless, the case was heard in St Albans Crown court. No verdict was reached. Then it was retried and Mr Cleeland was convicted. The case was subsequently considered in 2002 by the Court of Appeal, which discredited a lot of the evidence produced in Mr Cleeland’s initial trial.