Sept 2009“A murder which took place in 1979 and saw an innocent man jailed for 27 years was finally solved yesterday when police announced that the real killer was a 17-year-old boy who confessed to the crime in the 1980s, but committed suicide after officers refused to believe him.
Teresa De Simone, 22, was raped and strangled in the back of her own car in Southampton on 5 December 1979. In 1982 Sean Hodgson, a pathological liar who erroneously confessed to the killing, was wrongly jailed for her murder. The 27 years and one month he spent in prison, before being freed in March this year, represents one of the Britain's biggest miscarriages of justice.
He was freed after DNA evidence, not available at the time of the murder, proved he was not at the scene. Hampshire Police reopened the case and yesterday revealed that David Andrew Lace murdered Ms De Simone.
Lace, a petty criminal, had confessed to the murder after being arrested for other matters in 1983 – about 18 months after Hodgson was convicted – saying he could no longer live with the guilt. But with several other men also claiming to be the killer, and with who they thought to be the real culprit already behind bars, the police dismissed his confession.
On 9 December 1988 – four days after the ninth anniversary of the murder – Lace committed suicide. Last month his body was exhumed – only the second time an exhumation has taken place in an historic murder inquiry – and DNA tests proved a match for those found at the scene of Miss De Simone's death.
Yesterday Miss De Simone's mother, Mary Sedotti, 77, said that the naming of Lace brought closure for her and her partner Michael. She said: "It's a relief to get it all done, hopefully now we can start to move on. We are just relieved that all this has come to a close. I didn't ever think they would find anybody after all this time, I'm just so grateful."
But the Crown Prosecution Service pointed out that, as no trial is able to take place, it will never be proven beyond doubt that Lace was the murderer. Alastair Nisbet, senior Crown prosecutor, said: "The CPS has advised Hampshire Constabulary that the evidence would have been sufficient to prosecute David Lace, if he were alive, with the offences of the rape and murder of Teresa De Simone.
"But this is in no sense a declaration that he was guilty of the offences. Had Mr Lace lived, our decision would merely have authorised the police to begin the legal process by charging him. Only after trial does a jury decide whether a person is guilty or not, on a higher standard of proof – beyond reasonable doubt."
Lace was 17 at the time of the murder and was living in his home city of Portsmouth. Detective Chief Inspector Philip McTavish said that Lace confessed to the crime when he was being questioned about a series of burglaries. The confession came to light when detectives re-examined the murder case this year. He stated that he could no longer live with what he had done and that he was better off in prison," the detective said.
Lace told police he stole a rucksack and cash from a meter at his lodgings in Portsmouth on the day before Miss De Simone was killed. He then walked to Southampton and arrived in the early hours of December 5 at the rear of the Tom Tackle pub, where he saw Miss De Simone dropped back to her car by a friend.
"He approached the car and tapped on the window, asking Teresa the time," explained Mr McTavish. He then forced his way into the driver's seat beside her and locked the doors to prevent her escape. She struggled, he sexually assaulted her and strangled her using the passenger belt in the car."
Mr McTavish said officers at the time looked into the confession and decided it revealed "numerous and significant inconsistencies" including incorrect descriptions of the car and Miss De Simone's clothing. Sean Hodgson, on the other hand, provided police with details that the prosecution claimed only the killer could possibly know and was convicted after a trial at Winchester Crown Court.
Yet he could have been freed in 1998, but for a mistake by the Forensic Science Service (FSS). In 1998, Mr Hodgson's legal team asked the FSS for permission to re-examine 20 items found in Ms De Simone's car using DNA analysis. But the FSS had replied that the relevant exhibits no longer existed when, in fact, they did.
That error delayed Mr Hodgson's release by ten years, but yesterday his solicitor, Julian Young, claimed that Mr Hodgson, who is now 57, could have been freed even earlier had the police decided to pursue Lace's confession.
He said: "The police appear to have had David Lace in custody, admittedly for other matters. He made certain admissions. It appears the police, for reasons obviously I don't know decided they were not going to treat him as a suspect. He was not charged but for some reason that information was never passed on to Sean Hodgson or the legal team who were then representing him." But Mrs Sedotti says she still harbours anger towards Mr Hodgson, who is almost certain to receive a multi-million pound compensation package, despite his innocence. She said: "If it was not for him telling all those lies in the first place then the police may have carried on speaking to others."
A statement from the family of Lace released by police said: "We have been left shocked and saddened at the latest news that David has been shown to have been responsible for such a terrible crime. We very much wish to extend our sympathies and condolences to Teresa De Simone's family at what must be a very difficult time for them."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/killer-finally-unmasked-after-30-years-1789422.htmlMay 2011“A County Durham man who wrongly spent 27 years in jail for murder and rape has been given a three-year community order for sexual assault.
Sean Hodgson was convicted in 1982 of the rape and murder of Teresa De Simone in Hampshire, but this was quashed in 2009 when new evidence came to light.
But less that 18 months after his release the 60-year-old, of Willington, sexually assaulted a 22-year-old woman.
He was given the community order with supervision at Durham Crown Court.
Miss De Simone's body was found in her car at the rear of a pub in Southampton in 1979.
Hodgson was convicted of her rape and murder, but a forensic review discovered that DNA found at the scene was not his.
The Court of Appeal quashed his conviction and he was released in 2009.
Hodgson, of Park Street, Willington, near Crook, admitted sexually assaulting a vulnerable woman on 12 August last year.
Judge Christopher Prince said: "The fact this defendant has spent 27 years in custody for a crime he did not commit is not a relevant sentencing factor.
"He is not entitled to a reduction from sentence solely because he has served that time in custody.
"He clearly bears a great resentment against a criminal justice system that has deprived him of 27 years' liberty.
"The key is to protect the public as much as is possible from any possible future offending by Hodgson."
In 2009 Hampshire Police exhumed the body of David Lace, who committed suicide in 1988 at the age of 26, and DNA evidence revealed he was Miss De Simone's killer.
Hodgson, who suffers from depression and schizophrenia, maintained his innocence throughout his imprisonment for the murder, which prevented him from being paroled.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-13391943Was Sean Hodgson monitored following the overturning of his murder conviction by the CoA and was his case included in Carolyn Hoyle & Mai Sato’s research and the ‘ 437’ peoples lives changed’ Last year Professor Carolyn Hoyle stated, re the Criminal Cases Review Commission,
“437 peoples lives that have been changed around by the commission, many people who would otherwise be in prison and are out and those people are left to rebuild their lives that is not easy as research by one of my doctoral students has shown but none the less they have the opportunity to do so”
https://ox.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Embed.aspx?id=69d464e5-e28a-4400-b964-a9dd01201ea0
2008
Gabe Tan: Why join an Innocence Project?https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3lMN-eK7ByYGabe Tan saying how “ordinary people can do extraordinary things”
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Oct 2012"Justice should not depend on luck" by Gabe Tan
Gabe Tan argues that fresh evidence should not be needed in miscarriages of justice
”The Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) is often described as the safety net of the criminal justice system. One of its key functions is to ensure that the wrongly convicted can have their convictions quashed. In 1995, following a series of high profile miscarriages of justice including the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, the Criminal Cases Review Commission was established as an added safeguard to the Court of Appeal. Its role is to review alleged miscarriages of justice and refer convictions and sentences deemed to have a ‘real possibility’ of being quashed back to the Court of Appeal.
Yet, just how effective are these safeguards in protecting the innocent and ensuring their prompt acquittal?
On the 18th March 2009, Sean Hodgson walked out of the Royal Courts of Justice frazzled and overwhelmed by the crowding press. After 27 years of incarceration, it did not take the Court of Appeal much deliberation to declare Hodgson a free man. Hodgson’s conviction for the murder and rape of Teresa de Simone was overturned when DNA testing on biological swabs taken from the victim proved him to be factually innocent.
The Forensic Science Service very soon became the target of the media’s fingerpointing exercise for wrongly reporting that the swabs were destroyed 11 years earlier when the request for DNA testing was first made. Hampshire Police was also subjected to criticism for ruling out another suspect, David Lace, who confessed to the murder in 1983 and took his own life shortly after.
However, the focus on blaming individual parts of the criminal justice jigsaw lost sight of the systemic dysfunctions with the criminal appeal system that, for over two decades, failed to overturn Hodgson’s conviction.
The jury’s conviction of Hodgson back in 1982 was hardly surprising. At trial, the jury heard how Hodgson made a series of voluntary confessions – first to a priest, then to a prison officer, to the police and to his own solicitor. He made oral and written admissions to the murder, each time giving a detailed account of how he killed Teresa de Simone – details which, the prosecution claimed, could only have been known by the killer. Supporting his confessions, his blood group was a match to that of the killer, and he was undoubtedly present in the locality at the time of the murder.
The unreliability of Hodgson’s confession was put forward at trial and, certainly, when he applied for leave to appeal in 1983. Hodgson was a notorious compulsive liar with a known severe personality disorder. He had made repeated false claims to the police for other criminal offences, including confessions for two other murders that he could not have committed as they did not happen. Many of the details that the prosecution claimed could only have been known by the killer were widely reported in newspapers and television reports.
The then Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Hodgson’s leave to appeal almost as quickly as the Court of Appeal would allow it 26 years later. The initial appeal was dismissed on the basis that these arguments, as forceful as they may be, were either already heard by the jury or could have been made at the time of his trial. Instead, presumably because counsel had thought that Hodgson was unlikely to be able to withstand the prosecution’s crossexamination, a tactical decision was made for Hodgson to give an unsworn statement from the dock which barely gave details of why and how he had made up the false confessions. The safety net of the appeal court offered little protection to this vulnerable man. Rather, a severely mentally ill defendant was somehow to be individually blamed for not being able to stand in the dock and convincingly articulate to the jury the complex psychological processes that made him repeatedly confess to the most heinous of crimes.
The advent in knowledge on the phenomenon of false confessions appeared to be of no help at all to Hodgson either. Since the early 1990s, dozens of others who voluntarily confessed to crimes that they had not committed have had their convictions quashed due to fresh psychiatric evidence not heard at trial that rendered their convictions unsafe. Key examples include Judith Ward, Andrew Evans, Ashley King, Darren Hall and Patrick Kane who all suffered from forms of psychiatric or personality disorders that made them vulnerable to false confessions. As far back as 1989, the Lloyd-Bostock report cited false confessions as the second biggest cause of wrongful convictions in Britain after eyewitness misidentification. The pioneering work of internationally renowned forensic psychologist Professor Gisli Gudjonsson further enhanced our understanding of how even ordinary people with normal intelligence can be susceptible to making false confessions either voluntarily or under the pressures of police interrogation. It appeared that because Hodgson’s history of making false confessions was already known to the jury who nevertheless decided to convict him, the doctrine of finality precluded the (un)reliability of his confession from being re-examined.
As with all other appeals against conviction, the primary way to defy this long-standing doctrine is to find fresh evidence that renders a conviction unsafe – a requirement under section 23 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1968 and section 2 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 respectively. Hodgson’s fate was therefore sealed, at least until luck befell him with the discovery of the exonerating DNA evidence – the fresh evidence that held the key to his eventual acquittal by the Court of Appeal.
Hodgson is one of the ‘lucky’ few – perhaps an odd term to describe someone who served almost three decades of wrongful incarceration. However, the discovery of fresh evidence is not something that can be guaranteed for every innocent victim of wrongful conviction. Indeed, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which similarly applies the fresh evidence criteria in deciding whether to refer an application back to the appeal courts, has referred fewer than four per cent of over 13,000 applications it has received since its establishment.
The Innocence Network UK, established at the University of Bristol in September 2004 to facilitate investigations into alleged wrongful conviction has, to date, deemed around 200 prisoners (out of over 1,000 requests for assistance) to have a plausible claim of innocence. Many are convicted on evidence that is dubious to say the least – alleged cell confessions; inconsistent witness testimonies; questionable forensic evidence; and forms of highly circumstantial evidence. Almost all these 200 prisoners have failed in their first appeal – the principal reason being that arguments relating to the unreliability of the evidence that convicted them have already been heard by the jury and, unless fresh evidence is produced, the Court of Appeal is not entitled to go behind the jury’s verdict. Around half of these cases have been refused at least once by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Despite the questionable circumstances of their convictions, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, whose role is generally confined to a review of fresh evidence, can do little, if anything, to assist them.
However, returning to the case of Hodgson, it should not have required fresh evidence in the form of a DNA exoneration to quash his conviction 27 years later. He was convicted mainly on his own confession, which we knew then and certainly more so in the last two decades, to be an inherently unreliable form of evidence. Hodgson’s conviction should arguably have been overturned much earlier on the basis of his questionable confession alone. Yet, without the miraculous discovery of the DNA evidence, Hodgson would most certainly still be trapped within the prison system.
If there is anything that Hodgson’s wrongful conviction has taught us it is that justice should not be dependent on the luck of finding fresh evidence. If the overriding concern of the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Cases Review Commission is truly about safeguarding the innocent, then the requirement for fresh evidence should not be a barrier for revisiting the convictions of those who might be.
Gabe Tan is Executive Director of the Innocence Network UK (INUK)http://www.haldane.org/news/2012/10/1/justice-should-not-depend-on-luck-by-gabe-tan.htmlWhat were Professor Gisli Gudjonsson and other ‘experts’ findings in relation to David Laces confession to murder?
”He approached the car and tapped on the window, asking Teresa the time," explained Mr McTavish. He then forced his way into the driver's seat beside her and locked the doors to prevent her escape. She struggled, he sexually assaulted her and strangled her using the passenger belt in the car."
Mr McTavish said officers at the time looked into the confession and decided it revealed "numerous and significant inconsistencies" including incorrect descriptions of the car and Miss De Simone's clothing. Sean Hodgson, on the other hand, provided police with details that the prosecution claimed only the killer could possibly know and was convicted after a trial at Winchester Crown Court”.
Gabe Tan doesn’t mention Sean Hodgsons 2011 conviction for sexual assault. He apparently suffered ’from depression and schizophrenia’ around this time
”Hodgson, of Park Street, Willington, near Crook, admitted sexually assaulting a vulnerable woman on 12 August last year.”
And what were Professor Gisli Gudjonsson and other ‘experts’ findings in relation to Sean Hodgsons confession to sexual assault of a ‘vulnerable women’ ?