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Jurors cleared two brothers of the murder of the Turkish drug dealer, who had been shot on Monday, 11 March – first inside a betting shop, then again in the street after leaving the building. [62] Colin Stagg To Get Compensation". Sky News. 13 August 2008. Archived from the original on 20 November 2009. In the past 10 years, there have been very few successful first appeals: the Winchester Three case (a conspiracy against Tom King, then the Northern Ireland secretary); Michelle and Lisa Taylor (the sisters wrongly convicted of the murder of Alison Shaughnessy in Battersea); Ivan Fergus, a 13-year-old schoolboy who was the victim of mistaken identity; Jonathan Jones (wrongly convicted of murdering the parents of his partner, Cheryl Tooze, in South Wales); and the Merthyr Tydfil arson case (two young women wrongly convicted of causing the deaths of a young mother and her two children). In all those cases, the wrongful convictions had been delineated for the appeal court judges beforehand by an extensive series of media reports. Nine-year-old Christopher Stanley was last seen on 29 July 1992 talking with a friend and a neighbour on St Aubyn's Avenue, Hounslow. His body was found the next day in a wartime pillbox on Hounslow Heath; he had been strangled. A man stood trial for Stanley's murder the following year but was acquitted. [126] [127]
They say that JJ lied in court and, even though she was one of their best friends, they say they do not blame her. Lisa said: “I feel sorry for her. If she had the same police that I had, then I feel sorry for. You can’t blame her. She was just like us. She’d never had anything to do with the police, she was in there by herself, with no solicitor. What can she do? There is good evidence that juries are capable of insulating themselves from the prejudice of newspapers. There is the striking example of John De Lorean, the California car maker who was filmed by the FBI discussing a massive cocaine deal with undercover officers who were posing as drug dealers. When De Lorean was arrested, that film was broadcast around the world, to most damning effect. But when he came to trial, the jury acquitted him on the basis of the evidence before them. But what no jury can do is to acquit a defendant if the evidence of truth is concealed. MLA style: "Someone murdered our Alison.. & we want JUSTICE; PARENTS HEARTACHE AS POLICE CLOSE REVIEW INTO DAUGHTER'S STABBING.." The Free Library. 2003 MGN LTD 26 Nov. 2023 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Someone+murdered+our+Alison..+%26+we+want+JUSTICE%3b+PARENTS+HEARTACHE+AS...-a099543754 For the two sisters to have been the killers would have involved them in a frantic, almost impossible timetable. Alison Shaughnessy left her bank at 5.02pm. If she went straight to her home in Vardens Road, Battersea, she could have arrived at 5.37pm. The two sisters were seen at the Churchill Clinic in the south Lambeth Road, four miles away, at 6pm. So that gave them, at most, 23 minutes in which to enter the flat, kill Alison, destroy all forensic evidence, change and dispose of their bloodstained clothes, and - in the rush hour - make the four-mile journey to the clinic.Colin Stagg has been through a version of justice, albeit truncated, and he has been found not guilty. But I wonder whether he can actually say hand on heart that he believes people will meet him in the street and believe that. I do not believe the system served anybody that particular day. [7] One evening in the early summer of 1991, a police constable named Sean Oxley received an unusual phone call in his office in Bow Street police station. Oxley was then working with an undercover unit, mixing with homeless people to gather intelligence about street crime and he was well known among the social workers in the soup kitchens and hostels of central London. It was one of these social workers, an unpaid volunteer, who now called him.
Of the media coverage, Mr Ferguson said: 'The press, with I regret to say practically no exception, reported this trial in terms which were emotive, misleading, and which would have prejudiced the mind of any reader'. There were two important pieces of additional evidence. One of Lisa’s fingerprints was matched with a print on the inside of the front door of Alison’s flat in Vardens Road, Batter-sea, yet both Michelle and Lisa had firmly denied that Lisa had ever been there. Then, a surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital, Michael Unsworthwhite, who also lives in Vardens Road, informed detectives that, when cycling past at about 5.45 p.m. on the day of the murder, he had seen two girls running down the steps from the flat. A pathologist had already estimated the time of murder to be 6 p.m. Michelle and Lisa did have an alibi. At 6 p.m. Michelle was seen at work by several people; and Jacqueline (‘J.J.’) Tapp, a close friend who also worked at the Churchill, said that Michelle and Lisa were with her, watching Neighbours, during the critical 5.30-6 period. It was when she later retracted her statement that the sisters’ fate was sealed.Laurence Allison: Forensic Psychologists Handbook: Psychological Profiling and Criminal Investigation (2013) ISBN 9781134028863, p.198 Filmmaker Bernard O'Mahoney, a man who had originally campaigned for the release of the Taylors and who then had an affair with Michelle, has since claimed that she confessed to the murder to him and has campaigned for the sisters to be re-convicted. The case led to discussions about the role of press and media in relation to criminal cases. year-old McEwan was found dead or dying at his Aldridge Road home with bullet wounds to his head. Nine arrests were made over the Valentine's Day killing, but none of the arrested people was charged. [8] year-old Green suffered a frenzied stabbing in the office adjoining his shop, and his fiancée found his body there the next day. He was not known to have had any enemies, causing police to wonder if he had been murdered in a case of mistaken identity. Two men seen pushing Green into the shop on 1 February (the day of the killing) remain untraced. [55]
Craven's has been a cause célèbre in the north-east for some years. He was convicted of the murder of a young girl after a fracas in a Newcastle nightclub. During the CCRC reinvestigation, it emerged that the murder weapon - a shard of glass - had a fingerprint on it. The fingerprint was not Craven's, but police had never disclosed this information to the defence. Colin Evans: A Question of Evidence: The Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies, from Napoleon to O.J. Wiley 2002, ISBN 978-0-471-44014-7. MLA style: "ALISON WAS STABBED, BUT I LOST MY LIFE TOO; Woman cleared of Irish murder tells of her pain.." The Free Library. 2002 MGN LTD 26 Nov. 2023 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/ALISON+WAS+STABBED%2c+BUT+I+LOST+MY+LIFE+TOO%3b+Woman+cleared+of+Irish...-a082452614 There was much more. There were headlines about love-crazy mistresses and butchered wives which had no basis in evidence. There was the Daily Express reporting “Killer wept as she stroked her victim’s hair” though that had never been said in court. There was the Daily Sport explaining that Michelle Taylor had kept a diary, which was an accurate report, and adding that it contained “her true feelings of suppressed jealousy and hatred for her rival”, which was thoroughly inaccurate.
The 1995 Criminal Appeal Act remedied the former problem - by removing the supervisory role from the Home Office and setting up the CCRC - and exacerbated the latter by changing the grounds on which appeals were to be allowed from "unsafe and unsatisfactory" simply to "unsafe". In the case of R v Chalkley and Jeffries, the appeal court determined that "the former tests of 'unsatisfactoriness' and 'material irregularity' were no longer available"; appeal court judges could allow an appeal only if they were convinced that it was "unsafe" in its totality.
In September 2000, the Metropolitan Police began an 18 month reinvestigation into Alison Shaughnessy's murder. No new evidence or suspects were found, and it was decided to no longer investigate the case as no more could be done. [1] The police considered whether Michelle and Lisa Taylor could be charged with perjury or perverting the course of justice (they could not be re-charged with murder because of the double jeopardy laws in place at the time). [34] Alison's family never wavered from their view that the Taylors were guilty of the murder. [1] I hate Alison, the unwashed bitch. My dream solution would be for Alison to disappear as if she never existed and then maybe I could give everything I want to the man I love." Morton, James (12 August 2009). "Obituaries: Richard Ferguson: QC who acted for Rosemary West and the Brighton bomber". The Guardian. p.31. Lisa and Michelle Taylor grew up in Forest Hill in south east London in a stable family in a quiet street. They went to school, went out dancing, went to work, planned to get married one day and never threatened for a moment to break out of the obvious course which life had planned for them.Defence lawyers were also worried about other features. Jeannette Tapp, 26, a theatre assistant at the Churchill clinic, had originally given both girls a cast iron alibi for the evening of the murder. They were in her room at the clinic watching the soap opera Neighbours. After Stagg's acquittal, Pedder took early retirement from the police. He later faced corruption charges, but the case was thrown out by the judge in a pre-trial hearing on the grounds of insufficient evidence. [9] [10] [11] Reinvestigation and conviction [ edit ] Cold case review [ edit ] Downes was a 22-year-old mother of three. Her body was found close to Lamberts Restaurant on the road between Shifnal and Wolverhampton on 2 February 1991. She had been strangled and had extensive head injuries, and some of her clothes were missing. Downes was a sex worker and was last seen alive in Wolverhampton's red-light district. [56] Police believe she may have been a victim of Alun Kyte. [57]
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