Justice delayed is still justice
DOGGED detective work by an NUJ freelance investigator has achieved an absolute first in British legal history. A ghastly murder was committed and three innocent men were jailed. They were eventually freed on appeal and the real murderer identified and jailed.
It was the first time that had ever happened but that was far from the end of it. After further work 15 people were charged with perjury over their evidence in the original trial and three witnesses were jailed. They claimed, and the judge accepted it, that they had been bullied into lying by police anxious to gain a conviction, and in March it was announced that 13 police officers are to stand trial for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
This is the amazing Case of the Cardiff Three and it’s largely down to the work of freelance Satish Sekar who picked up the miscarriage of justice at the start in 1988 and has stuck with it for 20 years.
After the three wrongly convicted men — all black, as it happened, while the murderer was initially described by a witness as white — were freed, South Wales Police reacted to the campaign around the case with a fresh investigation. Amazingly, they turned to the person who had done most to discredit them: Satish Sekar. His pioneering work on the use of DNA helped them to discover new evidence that led to the killer.
He wrote a book, Fitted In, about the case, and when no-one would publish it, did so himself. Satish Sekar has taken up other cases with almost equally impressive results. He’s not a lawyer, he’s not a forensic scientist and he’s not a journalist with the resources of a big company behind him. There have indeed been times he has struggled to get anything on his cases into print.
But he has been driven, he says, by a desire to stop the damage to people’s lives, and to public trust, done by these cases. “False convictions are false comfort for the victims’ families and for society,” he says. “The only way of ensuring that the guilty don’t pay for their crimes is to convict the innocent. Miscarriages of justice help no-one at all, the public are horribly cheated.”
Many are now praising his work and one accolade is from a man who knows good journalism when he sees it. “There can be no doubt that but for Satish Sekar’s tireless determination, the real killer of Lynette White would never have been caught,” says Martin Shipton, the chief reporter, and Father of the NUJ Chapel, at the Western Mail in Cardiff.
More at Satish Sekar’s website www.fittedin.com