New video on the case:

[Nicholas]

Re: Charles Branson now known as Charles Salvador

Britain’s most notorious prisoner launches legal challenge to have parole hearing held in public
One of Britain’s most notorious prisoners has begun a legal action challenging the ban preventing parole hearings being held in public. Charles Salvador, previously known as Charles Bronson, has been in prison for most of the last 45 years and wants to waive his right to privacy and for his next parole hearing to be held in ‘the full public glare’.

Salvador’s legal team argues that the parole board rules’ blanket ban on public hearings is unlawful and, if successful, the challenge would force the government to change the regime. In particular, they argue that Parole Board Rules 2019, rule 15(3) requiring parole board hearings to be held in private offends the well-established principle of open justice as well as being in breach of the article six right to a fair and public hearing.

‘It is hoped that by providing Charles Salvador with the right to apply for a public parole hearing the public can gain a proper understanding of the parole process and it will push the secretary of state for justice to fully respect the independence of the Parole Board,’ comments his solicitor Dean Kingham of Swain and Co Solicitors.

The challenge is being brought by the same legal team, Dean Kingham together with barrister Matt Stanbury of Garden Court North, behind the recent challenge over concerns about the independence of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (the Gary Warner case – as reported on the Justice Gap here).

The government counters that open justice requirements are met by the possibility for a parole board to allow for observers and for a summary of a decision to be published. That falls ‘significantly short’ of what would be expected under the principles of open justice, the prisoner’s lawyers argue.

‘Charles Bronson’ became a fixture of the tabloid press over the years and is frequently referred to as ‘Britain’s most violent prison’. He now insists that he is a changed man. He changed his name in 2014 in tribute to the artist Salvador Dali.

‘I am sick of being behind closed doors and 20 foot walls,’ he says. ‘The public need to see and hear that I am no longer a violent man and I have proven it and will continue to.’

He is currently held at HMP Woodhill in a high security close supervision centre designed for the most disruptive and dangerous prisoners. He was sentenced to life in February 2000 after taking hostage a teacher at HMP Hull for 44 hours. In November 2018 he was acquitted at Leeds Crown Court of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent to a governor at HMP Wakefield. He represented himself.

His case has been reviewed by the parole board six times since his minimum term expired in February 2003, most recently in November 2017. According to his legal team, Salvador has been progressing well at Woodhill and has been recommended for a move to Whitemoor which is viewed as ‘the last step before removal’.

However, the prisoner has clashed with the Ministry of Justice over problems with access to correspondence including wedding photos after he married the late actress Paula Williamson. The prison is currently photocopying all mail received as part of a clampdown on drugs like Spice being sprayed on to letters.

According to Dean Kingham, his client is ‘currently at the mercy of the secretary of state for justice’. ‘He is relying on the minister to progress him out of the close supervision centre and give him the ability to argue his risk of future violence has reduced,’ he continues. ‘Unfortunately, the actions of the secretary of state most recently suggests the he will be very difficult towards him.’

Salvador intends to use his wedding photographs in his art. ‘Mr. Salvador is extremely anti-drugs and drug use is not linked to his risk of violence,’ Kingham adds.

The 2019 parole board regime was introduced in the wake of the furore over the Parole Board’s decision to release serial sex offender John Worboys. The latest legal challenge cites the judicial review of the Worboy decision (R (DSD) v Parole Board [2019] QB 285) and Salvador’s lawyers argue that the regime does not contemplate cases where the prisoner waives their own privacy rights. They believe that there is considerable and legitimate public interest in better understanding how a prisoner could be locked up for 45 years as well as how the parole board takes decisions in his case.

A post-Worboys government review considered the possibility of some hearings being heard in public. It concluded that concerns over public access could ‘compromise the confidence of witnesses and panel members to be as open and candid as a closed hearing allows’ and that safety and privacy concerns might ‘undermine the ability of prisoners to resettle successfully and safely’.
https://www.thejusticegap.com/britains-most-notorious-prisoner-launches-legal-challenge-to-have-parole-hearing-held-in-public/

The vastly experienced Dean Kingham heads our prison and public law team.

He is recognised as a leading prison law specialist and expert. He undertakes privately funded criminal work.

Dean has practiced in prison law for around 14 years. He is often at the forefront of the main challenges protecting the rights of prisoners.

He is consistently recognised for his specialism by Legal 500. He has featured in Legal 500 since 2013. In 2017 he was described as a ‘tenacious lawyer’ who is ‘very dedicated to his clients and always looking to push the envelope’.

In previous years he been described as an “excellent advocate”, “excellent and relentlessly pursues the prison authorities”, “the key contact” and a “specialist” in parole.

Dean fearlessly pursues the authorities.

His practice includes:

Parole and recall representation;
Category A representation;
Close Supervision Centre (CSC) representation;
Judicial Review;
Human Rights Challenges;
All prison law issues including:
Home Detention Curfew;
Re-categorisation;
Sentence planning and sentence calculation;
Adjudication assistance;
Reputation and Passion

Well known to Parole Board members, Dean is highly experienced in challenging prison authorities. His reputation of being fearless in arguments to the board has led to him to represent some of the most high profile prisoners.

It is common for Dean to dissect psychological research studies in order to enhance his client’s case. He utilises the studies within his parole arguments and catches prison psychologists unaware. He is viewed as being polite but firm.

Achieving release for prisoners who have no support for progression is one of Dean’s passions.

He uses a number of studies he has on denial/maintaining innocence, age on risk and the limitations to assessment such as the Risk Matrix 2000.

Dean is passionate about miscarriages of Justice and is committed to assisting prisoners who maintain their innocence. He writes articles for organisations assisting those whom maintain their innocence. Dean was asked to attend the Innocence Network UK 2011 annual meeting entitled, Investigating a claim of Innocence:  Going beyond a desktop review and be a guest speaker.

Dean has worked closely with the Koestler Trust and takes a keen interest in the exhibition each year. He has a number of artworks from prisoners displayed in his home as he recognises the excellent work of this organisation.
https://www.swainandco.com/team-view/dean-kingham/

[Nicholas]

Re: Charles Branson now known as Charles Salvador

Britain’s most notorious prisoner launches legal challenge to have parole hearing held in public
One of Britain’s most notorious prisoners has begun a legal action challenging the ban preventing parole hearings being held in public. Charles Salvador, previously known as Charles Bronson, has been in prison for most of the last 45 years and wants to waive his right to privacy and for his next parole hearing to be held in ‘the full public glare’.

Salvador’s legal team argues that the parole board rules’ blanket ban on public hearings is unlawful and, if successful, the challenge would force the government to change the regime. In particular, they argue that Parole Board Rules 2019, rule 15(3) requiring parole board hearings to be held in private offends the well-established principle of open justice as well as being in breach of the article six right to a fair and public hearing.

‘It is hoped that by providing Charles Salvador with the right to apply for a public parole hearing the public can gain a proper understanding of the parole process and it will push the secretary of state for justice to fully respect the independence of the Parole Board,’ comments his solicitor Dean Kingham of Swain and Co Solicitors.

The challenge is being brought by the same legal team, Dean Kingham together with barrister Matt Stanbury of Garden Court North, behind the recent challenge over concerns about the independence of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (the Gary Warner case – as reported on the Justice Gap here).

The government counters that open justice requirements are met by the possibility for a parole board to allow for observers and for a summary of a decision to be published. That falls ‘significantly short’ of what would be expected under the principles of open justice, the prisoner’s lawyers argue.

‘Charles Bronson’ became a fixture of the tabloid press over the years and is frequently referred to as ‘Britain’s most violent prison’. He now insists that he is a changed man. He changed his name in 2014 in tribute to the artist Salvador Dali.

‘I am sick of being behind closed doors and 20 foot walls,’ he says. ‘The public need to see and hear that I am no longer a violent man and I have proven it and will continue to.’

He is currently held at HMP Woodhill in a high security close supervision centre designed for the most disruptive and dangerous prisoners. He was sentenced to life in February 2000 after taking hostage a teacher at HMP Hull for 44 hours. In November 2018 he was acquitted at Leeds Crown Court of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent to a governor at HMP Wakefield. He represented himself.

His case has been reviewed by the parole board six times since his minimum term expired in February 2003, most recently in November 2017. According to his legal team, Salvador has been progressing well at Woodhill and has been recommended for a move to Whitemoor which is viewed as ‘the last step before removal’.

However, the prisoner has clashed with the Ministry of Justice over problems with access to correspondence including wedding photos after he married the late actress Paula Williamson. The prison is currently photocopying all mail received as part of a clampdown on drugs like Spice being sprayed on to letters.

According to Dean Kingham, his client is ‘currently at the mercy of the secretary of state for justice’. ‘He is relying on the minister to progress him out of the close supervision centre and give him the ability to argue his risk of future violence has reduced,’ he continues. ‘Unfortunately, the actions of the secretary of state most recently suggests the he will be very difficult towards him.’

Salvador intends to use his wedding photographs in his art. ‘Mr. Salvador is extremely anti-drugs and drug use is not linked to his risk of violence,’ Kingham adds.

The 2019 parole board regime was introduced in the wake of the furore over the Parole Board’s decision to release serial sex offender John Worboys. The latest legal challenge cites the judicial review of the Worboy decision (R (DSD) v Parole Board [2019] QB 285) and Salvador’s lawyers argue that the regime does not contemplate cases where the prisoner waives their own privacy rights. They believe that there is considerable and legitimate public interest in better understanding how a prisoner could be locked up for 45 years as well as how the parole board takes decisions in his case.

A post-Worboys government review considered the possibility of some hearings being heard in public. It concluded that concerns over public access could ‘compromise the confidence of witnesses and panel members to be as open and candid as a closed hearing allows’ and that safety and privacy concerns might ‘undermine the ability of prisoners to resettle successfully and safely’.
https://www.thejusticegap.com/britains-most-notorious-prisoner-launches-legal-challenge-to-have-parole-hearing-held-in-public/

Westminster commission on miscarriages of justice looks at watchdog’s independence
The Westminster commission currently looking into the miscarriage of justice watchdog considered concerns over its independence from government. At the end of July, the Justice Gap reported on a legal action by behalf a prisoner who is arguing that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) was not sufficiently independent of the Ministry of Justice. Gary Warner, sentenced to 16 years in prison for his role in an armed robbery, is currently challenging the CCRC’s rejection of his case.You can read the story here.

Concerns over the watchdog’s lack of independence was raised by Baroness Stern in an evidence session of the all-party parliamentary group on miscarriages of justice. ‘I understand that MoJ officials went into the CCRC, analysed the whole way of working in detail, and recommended a lot of very profound changes that had to be implemented, that were not recommendations but had to be implemented,’ she said.

The Justice Gap has seen minutes from a meeting between civil servants and the commissioners in February 2018 (quoted by the Warner’s lawyers) in which a leading MoJ civil servant appeared to insist that the watchdog accept changes to terms of employment for staff and to the structure of its board.

Stern asked the Professor Carolyn Hoyle of Oxford University’s Centre for Criminology was it ‘possible for the CCRC to act as if it were an independent body in these circumstances?’ The academic had previously raised her own concerns about changes to the tenure of the CCRC’s commissioners. One of the ‘huge challenges going forward’ for the CCRC was the new commissioners’ remuneration packages which resulted in ‘a massive increase in part-time – and I don’t mean 50%, I mean often less than that – commissioners’, she had said.

The CCRC is required to have 11 commissioners under its founding statute and the agreement of three is needed to refer a case to the Court of Appeal. Ten years ago nearly all the watchdog’s 11 commissioners were on full-time contracts with salaries and pension schemes. Now all but one are employed on a minimum one-day-a-week contracts and paid a day rate.

Professors Carolyn Hoyle and Mai Sato new book Reasons to doubt: Wrongful Convictions and the CCRC featured new research drawing on analysis of 147 of the commission’s cases. Hoyle said that the CCRC’s independence was not in her research’s remit, but added it was ‘very difficult to be critical of government when government are paying for your organisation’. She called the commission ‘massively under-resourced… for many, many years’. ‘The number of part-time commissioners at the moment goes against being an efficient and a thorough organisation – I have no doubt about that. And that is partly an issue of how government has decided to pay Commissioners, and that includes pension, it includes working rates, et cetera.’

Professors Hoyle told the Westminster commission that the CCRC was ‘not a perfect organisation’. ‘It has more variability in its responses to cases than I think any of us would like to see,’ she said. ‘Certainly than applicants and their legal representatives would want to see.’ She called the Birmingham-based group ‘somewhat cautious’ in its referrals and ‘sometimes too slow and too ponderous’.

Dr Dennis Eady of Cardiff University’s innocence project pointed out that the CCRC’s referrals had plummeted over the last three years – from a 20-year average of over 30 to just 13 last year. Eady said that a referral rate of ‘about 1%’ of the total number of applications represented ‘a snowball’s chance in hell’. ‘There’s a greater need now for a Royal Commission than there was in 1991. Things have got so bad, and so serious,’ he said.

Dr Eady was concerned that the APPG might make ‘a few recommendations’ for the CCRC to be ‘a bit bolder’ as the House of Commons’ justice committee did in 2015. ‘There’s a danger that we might mess around on the periphery of things, which might make them better for a little while. But I think essentially, we’ve got to be more radical in the approach we take.’

‘We’ve lowered the standard of proof consistently, we’ve knocked out due process safeguards, we’ve become a much more convictionist kind of society. We’ve had moral panics around sex offences and joint enterprise. And that bar has got lower and lower and lower in terms of convicting people. At the other end, as we’ve heard, the Court of Appeal’s bar has got higher and higher and higher. And the CCRC is stuck between the rock and the hard place.’
Dr Dennis Eady

Dr Eady said it was time to reform the Court of Appeal and allow for the CCRC t have more power and the ability to quash convictions. ‘In some ways, the only way to deal with the Court of Appeal, I’m afraid, is to take some of their power away.’

Erwin James, editor of the prisoners newspaper Inside Time and a member of the all party parliamentary group, spoke of his own experience as a prisoner helping a fellow inmate who he was convinced was innocent. James himself discovered evidence that in his view ‘totally undermined’ the prosecution case but would not have been allowed in by the Court of Appeal because the CCRC judged that it would have taken the view it was not fresh evidence. A situation the journalist called ‘absurd’.

Prof Hoyle rejected criticisms that the CCRC was ‘not fit for purpose’.  She said: ‘There are currently… maybe 480 people who are outside of prison who would otherwise be inside prison whose lives have been turned around, somewhat, because of the Commission’s work… and does a pretty thorough job of doing approximately 1400 applications a year, and making difficult decisions in those cases. So, it does a much better job than its predecessor, C3.’
https://www.thejusticegap.com/westminster-commission-on-miscarriages-of-justice-looks-at-watchdogs-independence/

[Nicholas]

I understand some 'pink' champagne was consumed at the Caribbean Cottage, Burnham on Crouch, post funeral.  A young guy loses his family in tragic circumstances and post funeral he goes out with a few friends for something to eat/drink? 

Two days after the funerals he makes a pass on Anji Greaves - what do you make of this Holly?

Bamber even talked to her about marriage

[ISpyWithMyEye]

Two days after the funerals he makes a pass on Anji Greaves - what do you make of this Holly?

Bamber even talked to her about marriage

Besides cheating on Julie, he certainly didn’t seem to be grieving in that shirt 48 hours after the killings...

[Nicholas]

Westminster commission on miscarriages of justice looks at watchdog’s independence
The Westminster commission currently looking into the miscarriage of justice watchdog considered concerns over its independence from government. At the end of July, the Justice Gap reported on a legal action by behalf a prisoner who is arguing that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) was not sufficiently independent of the Ministry of Justice. Gary Warner, sentenced to 16 years in prison for his role in an armed robbery, is currently challenging the CCRC’s rejection of his case.You can read the story here.

Concerns over the watchdog’s lack of independence was raised by Baroness Stern in an evidence session of the all-party parliamentary group on miscarriages of justice. ‘I understand that MoJ officials went into the CCRC, analysed the whole way of working in detail, and recommended a lot of very profound changes that had to be implemented, that were not recommendations but had to be implemented,’ she said.

The Justice Gap has seen minutes from a meeting between civil servants and the commissioners in February 2018 (quoted by the Warner’s lawyers) in which a leading MoJ civil servant appeared to insist that the watchdog accept changes to terms of employment for staff and to the structure of its board.

Stern asked the Professor Carolyn Hoyle of Oxford University’s Centre for Criminology was it ‘possible for the CCRC to act as if it were an independent body in these circumstances?’ The academic had previously raised her own concerns about changes to the tenure of the CCRC’s commissioners. One of the ‘huge challenges going forward’ for the CCRC was the new commissioners’ remuneration packages which resulted in ‘a massive increase in part-time – and I don’t mean 50%, I mean often less than that – commissioners’, she had said.

The CCRC is required to have 11 commissioners under its founding statute and the agreement of three is needed to refer a case to the Court of Appeal. Ten years ago nearly all the watchdog’s 11 commissioners were on full-time contracts with salaries and pension schemes. Now all but one are employed on a minimum one-day-a-week contracts and paid a day rate.

Professors Carolyn Hoyle and Mai Sato new book Reasons to doubt: Wrongful Convictions and the CCRC featured new research drawing on analysis of 147 of the commission’s cases. Hoyle said that the CCRC’s independence was not in her research’s remit, but added it was ‘very difficult to be critical of government when government are paying for your organisation’. She called the commission ‘massively under-resourced… for many, many years’. ‘The number of part-time commissioners at the moment goes against being an efficient and a thorough organisation – I have no doubt about that. And that is partly an issue of how government has decided to pay Commissioners, and that includes pension, it includes working rates, et cetera.’

Professors Hoyle told the Westminster commission that the CCRC was ‘not a perfect organisation’. ‘It has more variability in its responses to cases than I think any of us would like to see,’ she said. ‘Certainly than applicants and their legal representatives would want to see.’ She called the Birmingham-based group ‘somewhat cautious’ in its referrals and ‘sometimes too slow and too ponderous’.

Dr Dennis Eady of Cardiff University’s innocence project pointed out that the CCRC’s referrals had plummeted over the last three years – from a 20-year average of over 30 to just 13 last year. Eady said that a referral rate of ‘about 1%’ of the total number of applications represented ‘a snowball’s chance in hell’. ‘There’s a greater need now for a Royal Commission than there was in 1991. Things have got so bad, and so serious,’ he said.

Dr Eady was concerned that the APPG might make ‘a few recommendations’ for the CCRC to be ‘a bit bolder’ as the House of Commons’ justice committee did in 2015. ‘There’s a danger that we might mess around on the periphery of things, which might make them better for a little while. But I think essentially, we’ve got to be more radical in the approach we take.’

‘We’ve lowered the standard of proof consistently, we’ve knocked out due process safeguards, we’ve become a much more convictionist kind of society. We’ve had moral panics around sex offences and joint enterprise. And that bar has got lower and lower and lower in terms of convicting people. At the other end, as we’ve heard, the Court of Appeal’s bar has got higher and higher and higher. And the CCRC is stuck between the rock and the hard place.’
Dr Dennis Eady

Dr Eady said it was time to reform the Court of Appeal and allow for the CCRC t have more power and the ability to quash convictions. ‘In some ways, the only way to deal with the Court of Appeal, I’m afraid, is to take some of their power away.’

Erwin James, editor of the prisoners newspaper Inside Time and a member of the all party parliamentary group, spoke of his own experience as a prisoner helping a fellow inmate who he was convinced was innocent. James himself discovered evidence that in his view ‘totally undermined’ the prosecution case but would not have been allowed in by the Court of Appeal because the CCRC judged that it would have taken the view it was not fresh evidence. A situation the journalist called ‘absurd’.

Prof Hoyle rejected criticisms that the CCRC was ‘not fit for purpose’.  She said: ‘There are currently… maybe 480 people who are outside of prison who would otherwise be inside prison whose lives have been turned around, somewhat, because of the Commission’s work… and does a pretty thorough job of doing approximately 1400 applications a year, and making difficult decisions in those cases. So, it does a much better job than its predecessor, C3.’
https://www.thejusticegap.com/westminster-commission-on-miscarriages-of-justice-looks-at-watchdogs-independence/

Tru Benjamin
@tru68
“...one thing I did learn in prison is that there is no such thing as false hope - there is only hope.” Erwin James
@TheErwinJames

#JeremyBamber
#Innocent
#NoDisclosureNoJustice
8:52 AM · May 13, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

https://mobile.twitter.com/tru68/status/1260477941571555330

[Nicholas]

Tru Benjamin
@tru68
“...one thing I did learn in prison is that there is no such thing as false hope - there is only hope.” Erwin James
@TheErwinJames

#JeremyBamber
#Innocent
#NoDisclosureNoJustice
8:52 AM · May 13, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

https://mobile.twitter.com/tru68/status/1260477941571555330

Erwin James: The editor with a captive audience, a dark past and a mission to bring hope into prisons - Feb 2016
Erwin James has something most editors would envy, a truly captive audience.

The former Guardian  columnist took over this year as editor of Inside Time, the free monthly newspaper for the UK’s prison population.

Shared newspapers for prison wings were abolished under the current government, only prisoners who have earned special privileges have TVs in their cells and digital disruption is not something that James has to worry about.

So for many the UK’s 85,000-strong prison population Inside Time is one of their main windows on the world outside their cell. And with acirculation of 60,000 it has saturation coverage of its target market.

James takes over from Eric McGraw who stepped down as editor at the end of last year after founding the title 25 years ago in the wake of the Strangeways prison riot. He was director of Lord Longford’s Newbridge Foundation prison charity and launched the newspaper because he felt one of the reasons for the riots was that prisoners did not have a voice.

James knows his patch well, having been released in 2004 after serving 20 years of a life sentence. What made him want to edit Inside Time, hasn’t he had enough of prisons?

He says: “When Eric was retiring I got an email asking if I knew anyone who was interested in this job as editor, I mentioned a few names – but then said ‘I’m the best man for the job’.

“They say you should write what you know about and I know about prisons.’”

James clearly feels honoured to be not just a working journalist, but an editor, something he could never have dreamed of doing back in his previous life as a criminal, and convict.

James wants to raise the Inside Time’s profile and get it read throughout the criminal justice system and beyond.

Full article here https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/erwin-james-editor-capitive-audience-dark-past-and-mission-bring-hope-prisons/

Erwin James: from double murderer to newspaper columnist
Excerpts:
When an editor at The Guardian came looking for an inmate to write a column about prison life, James was an obvious choice. A life inside – full of insight and vivid characters – became a popular fixture in the paper.

At the bottom of the first column, published in 2000, The Guardian noted that James was serving a life sentence for two murders. For some readers, it became a consuming question: who did Erwin James kill?

They speculated in online forums. Was it, wondered one sleuth in 2008, a crime of passion? Surely there must be some excuse for this writer with his gentle wit.

Twelve years after he left prison, James has released a memoir, Redeemable. "I never thought I'd be someone who'd commit such terrible crimes," he says.

"I've ended up with a life that's quite meaningful and satisfying. And yet there's two people not here because of me – two people who will never have satisfaction. Their families will always be grieving. Because of me."

James avoids recounting the murders in his book, although the details emerged in 2009, thanks to internet users picking and picking at the facts.

At the crucial point in his memoir, there is a newspaper clipping reproduced on the page. The details are sketchy but seedy: 28-year-old James Monahan (as James was then known) and William Ross, 25, were convicted for killing Greville Hallam, a 48-year-old theatrical agent, and Angus Cochrane, a 29-year-old solicitor.

Hallam was robbed and strangled in his London home in 1982. In a separate incident, Cochrane died in hospital after being mugged in the West End.

James fled and joined the French Foreign Legion, but deserted to hand himself in. He still remembers the words the judge used to describe him at the trial. Brutal. Vicious. Callous.

Few people know exactly what happened when James' victims died. He has written down the story only twice: once in a confession to Joan Branton, the prison psychologist who helped transform his life, and once when applying for approval to visit Sydney in 2013. (It was granted. He gave a talk at the Opera House titled, A Killer Can Be a Good Neighbour.)

He believes that to give gory details would be an affront to the men he killed. "Just me being around is painful for my victims' families, I'm sure it is," he says.

By the time Hallam and Cochrane's names were linked to The Guardian's columnist, James was free. A woman who had known Hallam emailed to say she had admired James' writing for years "and now I've discovered you killed my friend".

James "cried like hell" and, after a while, wrote back saying sorry, asking if there was anything he could do. Her response was brief: "I regretted that email as soon as I pressed send."

Another of Hallam's friends wrote to say that the agent would have been proud of what his killer had achieved.

"Imagine how that made me feel," says James and for a moment it looks like he might cry.

He went to the British Library to dig out that old newspaper clipping for the book and while he was there, he pulled out another fragment from the archive: the local news story about the car crash that killed his mother when he was seven.

Back then, James was called Erwin James Monahan. From his mother's death until the day he took his two first names as a writer's pseudonym, life would be tough.

His father was a violent drunk. There was never enough to eat. A few weeks after James' 11th birthday, he was placed on probation for breaking into a television factory. After he robbed a bowling alley he was placed in state care.

The children's home where he lived for four years would be his only fixed address until he went to prison for murder. In between, he squatted, slept rough and stayed with girlfriends.

He had two daughters with different mothers, but both women threw him out for his drunken violence. James offers no excuses.

"Lots of people have difficulties in their lives and they get through it," he says.

In prison, he had time to stop and think. He put his name down for evening classes and remembered his childhood love of reading and writing. He did homework in his cell, listened to current affairs on the radio, passed the UK's school-leaving exams, then graduated from the Open University, majoring in history.

Early in his sentence, he met Branton in the "psycho's office" near the gated entrance to Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire.

"All she wanted me to do was succeed in being a better person," he says. "She wasn't thinking about the future. She was thinking, with the life that you've got left, you ought to use it to do the best you can."

The Guardian column came about by chance. A probation officer who knew James liked to write lived next door to the Irish novelist and screenwriter, Ronan Bennett. After James and Bennett struck up a correspondence, Bennett mentioned the prisoner's talents to Ian Katz, an editor at the newspaper.
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/erwin-james-20160318-gnlpei.html

[Nicholas]

Westminster commission on miscarriages of justice looks at watchdog’s independence
https://www.thejusticegap.com/westminster-commission-on-miscarriages-of-justice-looks-at-watchdogs-independence/

Mark Newby says today he ‘was dleighted to contribute to this important work’

Have yet to read the ‘report’ published today but Cardiff innocence project also contributed apparently

[Nicholas]

Mark Newby says today he ‘was dleighted to contribute to this important work’

Have yet to read the ‘report’ published today but Cardiff innocence project also contributed apparently

Link to report https://appgmiscarriagesofjustice.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/westminster-commission-on-miscarriages-of-justice-in-the-interests-of-justice.pdf

Commentary from CCRC https://t.co/b6qqJKqcLP?amp=1