Probably the longest running miscarriage of justice -

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12092185

"Probably the longest running miscarriage of justice"

And what exactly makes you believe that? Somebody did this murder and the courts looked at the evidence and twice concluded it was Hanratty. I've no idea if that verdict was correct but the (strong) probablility is that it was. If you have some new evidence go to the authorities or tell us all why you think Hanratty was innocent.

Don't forget quite a few guilty men claim to be innocent. There will be people who have been convicted that were innocent but remember that will be a minority.

Interesting story on the Today programme about this. They exhumed him 10 years ago and found DNA from the remains matched DNA from the scene of the crime which possibly may not mean much with the strong potential for contamination of the original 1961 evidence.
To be honest I think it is now too late to make any new judgement on this case bar using a time machine. It seems much less clear cut than the Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans miscarriages.

Blue Boy wrote:
"Probably the longest running miscarriage of justice"

And what exactly makes you believe that?

You are quite right that many claim to be innocent - but I remember seeing a documentary (many years ago) which seemed to provide alibi evidence (not heard at the trial).

I also think that if he were guilty the family would probably have let this die a natural death and not keep publicising it - after all they cannot bring him back, can they?

There was - imo - a "rush" to execute him (as was often the case in those days) and the appeal process did not have time to take effect before his execution.

Foz wrote:
Interesting story on the Today programme about this. They exhumed him 10 years ago and found DNA from the remains matched DNA from the scene of the crime which possibly may not mean much with the strong potential for contamination of the original 1961 evidence.

Now that we know that DNA is NOT the wonder-cure that it was once claimed to be (and that it can be manufactured, and therefor planted), I too am not convinced of the results from 10 years ago.

Evidence (in those days) was not protected (by bagging etc) and was frequently "left around" evidence rooms (anyone remember the unbagged Barry George coat which had been left in a room - the very same room where the firearms were kept? This could very easily have provided the "firearm particle" that the prosecution claimed was "damning evidence of guilt")

Remember - back in these days (early 60s) the police frequently manufactured "evidence" / "statements" etc !!!

no idea if he is innocent or guilty but DNA evidence is a double edged sword. If the story is correct then it may well have been contaminated.

There is always a problem with these cases...the 'establishment' cannot bear to admit fault and old cases make it seem that everything is OK today when just as many innocents are convicted.

There are more holes in this case, Veritas, than there are in a culinder !

===

Hanratty, a 25-year-old petty criminal who had spent most of the previous seven years in prison, was arrested in Blackpool in October. His appearance was similar to that of an identikit portrait produced at the time of the killing and he was identified by Valerie Storie although she had also previously identified another man. She also made a voice identification of him. But it later emerged that Hanratty was the only person with a London accent asked to speak in front of her.

Alibi evidence which placed Hanratty in Rhyl in north Wales at the time of the murder was discounted. He was convicted at Bedford Assizes on February 17, 1962. His appeal was dismissed on March 13, and, despite a petition signed by 28,000, he was hanged at Bedford prison on April 4.

Part of the case against Hanratty was that he had been identified by two men in the supposedly stolen Morris Minor in Redbridge, east London, on the morning after the murder. What has only now emerged through undisclosed material examined by the CCRC is that the stolen car had been sighted far away in Derbyshire by up to 11 different people at the same time. The existence of the car in that area had even been reported to a police station. This information was never passed to the defence.

Mr Bindman and journalists Paul Foot and Bob Woffinden said they were astonished at the new material which had now been made available.

The CCRC inquiry, led by the former assistant chief constable of the Metropolitan police, Baden Skitt, had been allowed access to material stored by the Metropolitan police but not released to the defence team. Some of the information was not even shown to the prosecution.

'It's quite clear that the CCRC is shocked by the non-disclosure,' said Mr Foot. He said that even people who had been working on the case for more that a quarter of century were amazed at the depth of material suppressed.

'The commission has expressed very serious concerns that vital evidence has been suppressed,' said Mr Bindman. 'There was information which, had it been disclosed, would have led to the acquittal of James Hanratty.'

Mr Bindman said DNA testing had also been carried out using recently improved techniques but he said that the tests were inconclusive and that there was always a risk with such old DNA material that the evidence would be contaminated.

if the late wonderful Paul Foot was on the case then Hanratty is undoubtedly innocent.

veritas wrote:
if the late wonderful Paul Foot was on the case then Hanratty is undoubtedly innocent.

Veritas, try and get hold of his book "Who Killed Hanratty" from 1971.

veritas wrote:
if the late wonderful Paul Foot was on the case then Hanratty is undoubtedly innocent.

From the Guardian, 2002 -

Hanratty's appeal is over,
but justice is yet to be done

The hanged man's alibi is still solid, and vital questions remain unanswered

By Paul Foot

Even a lord justice of appeal can work out that if you are in Rhyl, you cannot commit a murder near Bedford. The essence of the case for the innocence of James Hanratty, who was hanged in 1962 for the A6 murder, is that on the day of the murder he travelled to Liverpool, and then on to Rhyl. Soon after his arrest in October 1961, he told his lawyers that in Liverpool he had called at a sweetshop in the Scotland Road to ask the way to Tarleton or Carlton Road. Mrs Olive Dinwoodie gave evidence to say

(a) that she recalled a man looking like Hanratty calling at her shop and asking the way to Tarleton or Carlton Road and

(b) that she was only serving in the shop for two days - on August 21 and 22, 1961 - the day of the murder.

Seven prosecution witnesses put him in London on the 21st. So if Hanratty did go to the shop, he must have gone on the 22nd and could not have climbed into Michael Gregsten's car at 9pm that evening and shot him dead five hours later. Stumped by this evidence, the prosecution suggested that Hanratty might have "bought" the alibi - a surprising notion since the man who sold him such an alibi needed to look and speak very like Hanratty.

At his Bedford trial in January and February 1962 Hanratty changed his original story about what he did next. He said he had gone on to Rhyl, and spent the night there. He described the guest house where he stayed which had a green bath in the attic. The landlady of a Rhyl guest house called Ingledene, which had a green bath in the attic, said a man looking like Hanratty had stayed at Ingledene for two nights in the third week of the previous August. Cross-examined, she admitted that the guesthouse was full for at least one of the nights, and broke down. Her evidence was discounted.

Over the years that followed many more witnesses substantiated Hanratty's Rhyl alibi. The most impressive was Mrs Margaret Walker, who lived in the street behind Ingledene. She went to the police during the trial and told them of a young man who had come to her house on the night of August 22 1961, looking for lodgings. Two other women in the street told the same story.

After interviewing all these witnesses in the late 1960s, I was convinced that Hanratty was in Rhyl on the night of the 22nd. I wrote a book about the case. The case was referred to the criminal cases review commission in 1997. Their inquiries were led by Bill Skitt, former chief constable of Hertfordshire. All the initial inquiries pointed to Hanratty's innocence. Right at the end, the commission carried out DNA tests on fragments connected with the murder.

For years, those of us campaigning for Hanratty's innocence had been asking for these DNA tests, but were told that no DNA could be recovered from the exhibits.

In November 1997 scientists took a swab from Michael Hanratty, the dead man's brother. To the astonishment of the commission, there was a match with his DNA and a handkerchief wrapped around the murder gun when it was found after the murder, and a small square of knickers worn by Valerie Storie on the night she was raped and she and her lover, Michael Gregsten, shot.

In April 1998, a further swab was taken from Hanratty's mother. Michael Hanratty, Jim's brother, and his wife Maureen remember going to the old lady's bedside with Mr Skitt to take the swab. She remembers Skitt saying: "Your brother was innocent - we just can't explain the DNA." Another match was found, and later confirmed when James Hanratty's body was dug up later that year. In spite of the findings, the case was still referred to the court of appeal, which heard the appeal over the past few weeks. The DNA findings conflicted grotesquely with the alibis. If Hanratty was guilty, as the DNA suggested, he could not have been in Liverpool and Rhyl. If he was in Liverpool and Rhyl, there must be something wrong with the DNA.

All of us who had followed the case over the years hoped that the appeal would solve this contradiction. As it became clear that the DNA evidence was likely to be accepted, I wondered what new evidence would damage the alibi. Had the authorities discovered, for instance, who sold Hanratty his sweetshop alibi, or whether Hanratty had stayed at Rhyl on some other week that summer of 1961?

In the hearing, absolutely nothing was produced to cast any doubt on the alibi witnesses in the Liverpool sweetshop or the Rhyl guesthouse. Apart from a few remarks about the speed of Hanratty's movements if he did go to the sweetshop that evening (based, I believe, on a wrong assumption about the train he got to Liverpool), the judges (Woolf, Mantell and Leveson) passed on the unlikely and unproved prosecution theory that the sweetshop alibi was bought. Neither they nor the prosecution could find anything to discredit the witnesses in Rhyl.

What meanwhile was the case against the DNA on the knickers? The appellants suggested that over 40 years in police custody the fragment of knickers could have been contaminated. No one could explain, for instance, what was in a vial which had been stored among the exhibits and broken. Could it have contained fluid from a wash of Hanratty's trousers, which were also kept as exhibits and which contained some of his semen? No, said the judges. They accepted the DNA evidence wholesale, and then turned to the 24 cases of police failure to disclose vital evidence.

What about the ESDA tests which showed that a crucial part of the police notes of an interview with Hanratty - the part which referred to him using the word "kip" as the murderer had done, and which he denied - had been rewritten after the original notes had been completed? "Of peripheral significance" said the judges. What about the failure to disclose the alibi statements from Rhyl before the trial? That didn't matter because they were disclosed after the conviction and before the original appeal (where they were not used).

What about the sightings on the morning of the murder of the murder car as far away as Matlock, which contradicted the evidence of identification witnesses, and were notified to the police at the time and not passed on to the defence? Though the judges described this as the "high watermark of non-disclosure", they concluded: "We do not consider that on its own it reveals such fatal unfairness as to render the conviction unsafe." Every one of the appellants' complaints about non-disclosure was similarly rejected.

After dismissing the appeal and patronising the Hanratty family, the judges had a warning for the criminal cases review commission. "There have to be exceptional circumstances," they concluded, "to justify incurring the expenditure of resources on this scale on a case of this age."

This was an echo of a similar sulk by another lord chief justice, Lord Lane, in the first appeal of the Birmingham six in 1986, which was also dismissed mainly on grounds of scientific evidence. The Birmingham six went back to prison for another five years before their innocence was finally established. James Hanratty can never be released, but as the expertise in DNA grows, perhaps scientists in the future will apply their minds to the DNA evidence in this case and seek to solve the continuing riddle of how it proved that a man who was in Rhyl managed to commit a murder near Bedford.